Thursday, September 25, 2008

Week 6 readings

Computer Networks & LAN articles

The first article was helpful in describing the different types of networks since I had only ever heard of local area networks previously. Also helpful was the explanation of intra- and extranet since these are used by my department at Pitt but I never quite understood what they were.

The LAN article brought up an interesting point that networks started basically to save money since at that time, disk space and printers were much more expensive than they are now.

RFID

It doesn't appear that RFID would be that useful in a library setting. For reasons mentioned in this article, it is unclear whether the hassles/problems outweigh the benefits. The article is from 2005 and I wonder what, if anything, has changed since then.

2 comments:

Rand said...

It really is unclear as to whether the costs of RFID would outweigh the benefits in a library setting. I'm pretty sure that tags have only gotten smaller and less expensive since that article was written, though.

Melissa said...

I don't know...the idea of being able to scan a row of books at once without moving them seems like an incredible time-saver. None of the problems discussed sounded insurmountable to me. The general trend in technology is for things to get smaller and cheaper, so I think that eventually RFID technology will be a money-saver for most libraries.