Week 4 - Musings...

Data Compression - from Wikipedia

Reading this informative article brought to the forefront, for me, the issue of compatibility in computing. Compression is obviously one area that suffers from the potential of systems not communicating properly because of a lack of a standardized language to facilitate compatibility. The concept of compression itself is appealing as a means of making material available without the necessity for huge disk capacities. At the same time, the various means of compression and the lack of definitive standards have led to the proliferation of various file formats and compression types that each require a different piece of software to decode and decompress (i.e. - MPEG 1, 2, 4 compression, to say nothing of the various proprietary file formats: MP4, AVI, Quicktime, etc.)

Data Compression Basics - from DVD-HQ

This is one of those articles that has 'basics' in the title and I'm content to believe it until about the 5th page and I start getting lost. The author, in fairness, tries to simplify things where possible and keeps an informal tone throughout. I made it through Part 1 with at least an understanding in the conclusion of where lossless compression is useful. I feel that section could have been expanded upon (with less time spent explaining the details of the compression algorithms), but that overall the point was made.The explanation of lossy compression on the other hand was explained well early on and my immediate association was to the questions of representation of content vs. representation of the object that crops up in many archival settings. In dealing with digital images, it is important to be aware of the ways in which various file formats and compression algorithms alter images, even if the results are nearly indistinguishable to the layperson viewing the images.

Imaging Pittsburgh... - Edward A. Galloway

Galloway's examination of the IMLS grant program to digitize multiple images across institutions touched on a number of critical themes for librarians and archivists. Primary among these was the critical role of standards and the need to ensure that standards are well-communicated in cross-institutional projects such as these. It seems these institutions didn't come to an agreement on metadata and subject-heading standards until later in the process and that issues persisted through the project as to the nature of how these should be resolved. Another that I noticed was the importance of communication and interaction, especially as it relates to core functions and understandings. The classic library/museum/archive boundaries seemed to pose problems to all these well-established institutions who, presumably, would have some awareness of the issues going into a project such as this. A concluding note: it seems from my experience that the direction of higher education (and obviously IMLS) is to push for outcomes-based assessment - libraries may do well to adopt this type of internal assessment system, though I think much work in training needs to be done for this type of paradigm shift.

YouTube and Libraries - Paula L. Webb

Not a particularly informative article and didn't introduce many new or difficult concepts. This seems like a good primer to a novice librarian with little exposure or experience working with YouTube's interface and with ambitions for greater access. For more advanced users, this article provides only the basest of conclusions that are already well-known or self-evident.