Muddiest Point Week 12

Might social tagging sometimes be less useful that we think? Some blogs -- popular ones, even -- use tagging as a source of humor, by putting in joke tags (the opposite of the actual content, overly specific, sarcastic or whatever). The point is to laugh when you see them, not to actually click on them. I think this is probably a small minority of tags, but I still feel like it's not addressed by all these authors who are so gung-ho about how social tagging is going to make everything super-easy to find forever.

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Week 12 readings

Reichard & Harder: Weblogs

Blogging applications = social software (bottom-up rather than top-down). Makes sense. Interesting they recommend disabling comments sometime.

Blogs seem to have really taken off in libraries (I say this from the article's examples and my own experience). Do they have potential in archives, too? Posting about the latest collection you've accessioned?

Allan: Wiki

This article makes wikis sound very useful for groups working together as a way to share information. I guess my question is, how is it different from having a blog with multiple contributors who have editing privileges? A wiki would have more formatting options I suppose (Allan talks about handouts which would presumably be printed and given to students).

Arch: Social Tagging

Oh, the word "folksonomy" is so cute.

Social tagging in a library catalog? I can see the uses -- PittCat can be tricky to navigate sometimes, and in closed-stacks libraries like the Frick Fine Arts Library where I work, students can't go wander in the shelves and browse. If they could see what books other had found useful -- grouped by subject rather than call number which can be misleading -- this could make life a lot easier.

Wales: Wikipedia

Wow, I have been reading/writing about wikipedia so much this semester and only now am I actually learning its history. This dude is proud of himself, huh? I mean, with reason. I like that wikipedia is not English-centric.

The Neutrality Policy allows people to express their views as long as couched in language like "some critics say" or something that indicates that Wikipedia itself remains netural.

But if you are "asked to leave the community," is it by contributors or by Jimmy himself? I imagine it must be a vote/dialogue similar to the process of deleting pages.

Muddiest Point Week 11

So are other institutions building their own Dspace-like respositories or just joining Dspace? Could Dspace become too big? I created an account and have been trying to look at presentations & articles but I keep getting the message "Internal System Error"....

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Week 11 Readings

Mischo. Digital Libraries: Challenges and Influential Work

I had no idea about the DL-1 and DL-2 initiatives. Funded by NASA and the FBI? How interesting. It seems that access to scientific journals and things like GIS really drove the project -- public libraries weren't really a concern at that point.

I am not entirely sure I understand the usage of "federated" here, as in "federated search." It seems to mean searching multiple databases at the same time. So is it interchangeable with "aggregated search"? And/or "harvested" search? I am getting a bit tripped up by the lingo, perhaps someone can clarify this in class.

Paepcke: Dewey Meets Turing

Interestingly structured article -- librarians v. computer scientists. It's too bad librarians didn't win; the article could have been called "Dewey Defeats Turing." LOL!!!!

Actually it's a pretty good lesson in why librarianship has turned into such a tech-savvy profession.

Also a quote that applies to a lot of what we've been reading for LIS 2000: "At the same time that they herald online self-publishing as the breakage of shackles from the tyranny of publishers, tenure committees cannot wrestle themselves into granting the same respect to online-only work that they afford traditional journal articles."

In this article's view, the role of the librarian in coming years will be to help create the organizational structure as academic fields switch over to an online scholarly presence. And once that is accomplished...?

Lynch: Institutional Repositories

This addresses similar issues of scholarly publishing. It goes a little further in describing exactly how institutional repositories function, and distinguishing between publishing and the broader "communication." Repositories are not a replacement for journals -- I keep thinking of all our Panopto videos from this semester. Do they have a repository or will they vanish? They could be a great future reference -- imagine rewatching a lecture years later, instead of trying to decipher your old messy notes...

"Stewardship is easy and inexpensive to claim; it is expensive and difficult to honor." Another way of looking at the future of librarians -- stewards of these repositories.

Muddiest Point Week 10

Is Z39.50 any different than WorldCat? The description in class made them seem pretty similar, although I suppose WorldCat is technically a database rather than a search engine. But wouldn't they have the same results in the end?

Assignment 6: Website

Here is my website.

just in case, that's http://www.pitt.edu/~mec111

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