The URL for my website:
http://www.pitt.edu/~btm32/
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Friday, November 12, 2010
Week 10 - Musings...
William H. Mischo - Digital Libraries: Challenges and Influential Work
It's been my experience that the argument of federated searching (which is advocated in this article) as the 'way of the future' is not really living up the its much-hyped potential. While the idea of federated searching is certainly glamorous and plays well into recent generations' expectations of consolidated information retrieval from the fewest sources possible, it seems that vendors and libraries have struggled to effectively implement federated searching with the level of granularity necessary for serious researchers seeking very specified pieces of information. Case in point (not to offend any Pitt librarians), try writing a literature review by using articles retrieved using Pitt's federated journal search page - the level of detail and control necessary for specific data retrieval just isn't available. A side note: it is impressive to see how colleges and universities have pushed the envelope of digital collections technology and prompted many important innovations in information delivery and retrieval.
Paepcke, Garcia-Molina, and Wesley - Dewey Meets Turing
The authors make interesting points here - I think that while they conceive of a much more polarized split between librarians and computer scientists (and there may be some truth to it), the reality of these two professions today is such that the specialized aspects of both are starting to branch back toward each other. The lines of distinction between the two are becoming increasingly blurred as the common issues each face become more relevant to the other. If anything, the symbiosis the authors seem to recognize between the disciplines in the area of digital collections are more relevant today than perhaps they even were at the time this article was written. Neither side can easily disregard the standards and methods of the other.
Clifford Lynch - ARL: Institutional Repositories
Very well argued and goes back to one of the points Paepcke, Garcia-Molina, and Wesley make about the legitimacy of digital scholarly communication in an atmosphere that is not conducive to rewarding/recognizing non-traditional dissemination of scholarly material. I would have some concern about those faculty members who may find the idea of an institutional repository attractive for the purposes of preservation, but who feel the need (for career advancement purposes or otherwise) to participate in the 'traditional' scholarly communication channels. Is there enough incentive in institutional repositories to justify some faculty making their scholarly work openly available when there is some potential that they can still use it to leverage professional advancement from it?
It's been my experience that the argument of federated searching (which is advocated in this article) as the 'way of the future' is not really living up the its much-hyped potential. While the idea of federated searching is certainly glamorous and plays well into recent generations' expectations of consolidated information retrieval from the fewest sources possible, it seems that vendors and libraries have struggled to effectively implement federated searching with the level of granularity necessary for serious researchers seeking very specified pieces of information. Case in point (not to offend any Pitt librarians), try writing a literature review by using articles retrieved using Pitt's federated journal search page - the level of detail and control necessary for specific data retrieval just isn't available. A side note: it is impressive to see how colleges and universities have pushed the envelope of digital collections technology and prompted many important innovations in information delivery and retrieval.
Paepcke, Garcia-Molina, and Wesley - Dewey Meets Turing
The authors make interesting points here - I think that while they conceive of a much more polarized split between librarians and computer scientists (and there may be some truth to it), the reality of these two professions today is such that the specialized aspects of both are starting to branch back toward each other. The lines of distinction between the two are becoming increasingly blurred as the common issues each face become more relevant to the other. If anything, the symbiosis the authors seem to recognize between the disciplines in the area of digital collections are more relevant today than perhaps they even were at the time this article was written. Neither side can easily disregard the standards and methods of the other.
Clifford Lynch - ARL: Institutional Repositories
Very well argued and goes back to one of the points Paepcke, Garcia-Molina, and Wesley make about the legitimacy of digital scholarly communication in an atmosphere that is not conducive to rewarding/recognizing non-traditional dissemination of scholarly material. I would have some concern about those faculty members who may find the idea of an institutional repository attractive for the purposes of preservation, but who feel the need (for career advancement purposes or otherwise) to participate in the 'traditional' scholarly communication channels. Is there enough incentive in institutional repositories to justify some faculty making their scholarly work openly available when there is some potential that they can still use it to leverage professional advancement from it?
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Week 9 - Musings...
Martin Bryan - An Introduction to the Extensible Markup Language (XML)
By far the most helpful article because it made an attempt to start from the very beginning for those whose experience or pre-existing knowledge of XML is limited to non-existent. My only experience working with XML was my class project using EAD in Archival Representation - before that, I had no experience or knowledge of it. Even that introduction to a very specific iteration was not enough. This article 'pulled back' a bit from that very specific application and allowed me to understand more of the context of how XML is utilized in a broader sense outside of archival representation. Further helpful was the concept of how a DTD is created - University of Pittsburgh's Archive Service Center DTD was utilized for our project and the creation of one from scratch was not covered. This article helped fill in some knowledge gaps there.
Uche Ogbuji. - A survey of XML standards - Part 1
This quickly devolved into something I struggled to understand - I attribute this to my struggles to comprehend theoretical technical content that's removed from its practical implementation and context. Were I to see where some of these standards were at work and how they impacted the 'end result' of XML, I might comprehend them a bit better. As it stands in this article, it seems unable to explain them very well without pointing you to a completely new tutorial or article - for me, this bodes poorly for the ease of use of XML and makes it seem much more difficult to use than perhaps was the intention if its creators.
Andre Bergholz - Extending Your Markup
A better article at introducing some XML concepts in a more logical progression and context. The idea of namespaces made a little more sense after reading this article as well. Some of the later concepts still went over my head - were I to be working with them or to have a live demo of how some of these concepts 'work' in a practical context, it might make more sense. I found this to be true working with EAD. I found the article was not very helpful in describing XML schemas - after reading this, I can tell that it's different and supposedly preferable to DTD, but when adjectives like, 'more expressive' are used without really clarifying what that means, I don't find it helpful or explanatory.
w3schools - XML Schema Tutorial
Again, approaching this from an archival description standpoint, it seems that XML schemas would have a great deal of potential for working with and describing digital archival records because of their flexibility in content and data types which can be incorporated. I think I understand some of the reasons that XML schemas are preferable to DTD, but this got a bit more technical and some of the distinctions still weren't entirely clear to me.
By far the most helpful article because it made an attempt to start from the very beginning for those whose experience or pre-existing knowledge of XML is limited to non-existent. My only experience working with XML was my class project using EAD in Archival Representation - before that, I had no experience or knowledge of it. Even that introduction to a very specific iteration was not enough. This article 'pulled back' a bit from that very specific application and allowed me to understand more of the context of how XML is utilized in a broader sense outside of archival representation. Further helpful was the concept of how a DTD is created - University of Pittsburgh's Archive Service Center DTD was utilized for our project and the creation of one from scratch was not covered. This article helped fill in some knowledge gaps there.
Uche Ogbuji. - A survey of XML standards - Part 1
This quickly devolved into something I struggled to understand - I attribute this to my struggles to comprehend theoretical technical content that's removed from its practical implementation and context. Were I to see where some of these standards were at work and how they impacted the 'end result' of XML, I might comprehend them a bit better. As it stands in this article, it seems unable to explain them very well without pointing you to a completely new tutorial or article - for me, this bodes poorly for the ease of use of XML and makes it seem much more difficult to use than perhaps was the intention if its creators.
Andre Bergholz - Extending Your Markup
A better article at introducing some XML concepts in a more logical progression and context. The idea of namespaces made a little more sense after reading this article as well. Some of the later concepts still went over my head - were I to be working with them or to have a live demo of how some of these concepts 'work' in a practical context, it might make more sense. I found this to be true working with EAD. I found the article was not very helpful in describing XML schemas - after reading this, I can tell that it's different and supposedly preferable to DTD, but when adjectives like, 'more expressive' are used without really clarifying what that means, I don't find it helpful or explanatory.
w3schools - XML Schema Tutorial
Again, approaching this from an archival description standpoint, it seems that XML schemas would have a great deal of potential for working with and describing digital archival records because of their flexibility in content and data types which can be incorporated. I think I understand some of the reasons that XML schemas are preferable to DTD, but this got a bit more technical and some of the distinctions still weren't entirely clear to me.
Friday, November 5, 2010
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