Week 6 Readings

Wikipedia/ Local Area Networks

Funny, I have never heard or seen the term WAN (wide area networks) used. Perhaps they are not very useful. But...wouldn't the internet itself be a WAN?

"... from about 1983 onward, computer industry pundits would regularly declare the coming year to be 'the year of the LAN.'" Har. Sort of like how the Paperless Office is always just around the corner.

MAN (metropolitan area network) is also a thing I have never heard of. In Philadelphia, the city government was forever trying to set up a huge wireless network so that everyone would have internet access, but something kept going wrong with it, they kept switching providers, etc. If it ever works, though, I suppose it will be a MAN.

So, when we access PittCat databases through SSLVPN, we are "tunneling" across the internet to join our LAN to Pitt's LAN.

Wikipedia/ Computer Network

I probably should have read this first as a LAN is a type of computer network. Oh well.

"In this regard the visual and operational characteristics of a network are distinct; the logical network topology is not necessarily the same as the physical layout." This reminds me of our discussion of databases; just because the database looks like a table to us does not mean the underlying structure is a table. Similarly, although our computers may actually be connected in a straight line and look to us like a bus network, the underlying structure may be one of the other network configurations.

Another acronym: PAN. This would be my computer and the things it is hooked up to with a USB cable, like a printer (if I had one) and sometimes my digital camera.

Would the PittNet wireless network be a LAN or a campus area network (CAN)?

I am a bit confused on the difference between a bridge and a router. They both connect multiple networks...the former at the data layer and the latter at the network layer. I guess I need to understand the OSI model better. Hopefully we will go over this in class.


YouTube/ Common Types of Computer Networks

A recap of the wikipedia articles. Always nice to have a person explaining things to you out loud (and he nicely says we can email him if we have questions).

This answers my question about Wireless PittNet, I guess it is indeed a CAN.

Coyle, K. (2005). Management of RFID in libraries. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 31(5), 486-489.

If any authority figures are reading, this was kind of hard to access, maybe you could provide a link for future classes.

So: a radio frequency identifier is a sort of high-tech barcode. Similar to getting a chip implanted in your dog's ear or an EZ-Pass for toll roads.

It seems less useful for security than for locating items that get lost within the library, which in my experience happens a lot, especially in a big multi-library system like the ULS.

I would support a change from barcode to RFID -- this article makes it sound fairly inevitable anyway -- but I would like to read more on the privacy issues that come with this technology.