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Monday, December 8, 2008
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Monday, November 24, 2008
Friday, November 21, 2008
Week 11 muddy point
This is regarding the DiLight hand-on-point. I registered and everything and was looking around and a ton of the links didn't work - I kept getting an 'internal server error'. Also, a few links from the slides were outdated and didn't work. For an IT class, this isn't a good thing.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Week 12 Readings
Weblogs: Their use and application in science and technology libraries
This article provided an interesting history of blogs (in all honesty, I hate that word) and find it very neat that they sprung from sites that summarized new/interesting websites way back in 1996, when the Internet was much smaller obviously. I wonder if things like Digg are similar to this now or are there other sites that still do this? I really do not know but I would think it would be next to impossible because of the sheer size of the Internet.
I like the whole idea of 'co-evolution' instead of control when it comes to interaction between people on blogs. I can only assume that's a main draw of them and I am starting to see how they could really help for members of research projects, especially in medicine and other fields where timeliness of publication, etc. is very important.
I didn't really understand the whole 'having to go to the website' criticism of blogs. This is the only criticism metioned in the article and it is laughably minor. I wonder if other criticisms exist.
It is going to be more and more important for librarians of all types to know how to create and use blogs effectively. However, creating them is the easy part. Finding the time to keep them updated, etc. isn't so easy.
Using a wiki to manage a library instruction program...
This article provides a good definition and various uses of wikis in a very specific setting. The main idea I got from the article is that knowledge should be shared, coordinated and built upon and that's what wikis do. In the long run, I wonder what effect wikis and blogs will have on advances in science and technology.
Creating the academic library folksonomy...
Trying to 'catalog the Internet' seems like an impossible task but through social tagging of items from a variety of web sources (licensed databases, etc), it is a good replacement for the idea of cataloging. The article is right in that there is a lot of 'gray literature' out there. Right now at work, we have a subscription to the New York Academy of Medicine Gray Literature Report which arrives bimonthly to my email address and provides links to hundreds of gray articles, reports, etc. Here's a link to the most current report
This report helps but how do we really know what else is out there that would benefit the research being done in my department? Hopefully because of things like Zotera and citeulike which are somewhat easy to use and very helpful, more and more people will get turned onto tagging.
Wikipedia video
It's interesting that this class has been the only one in my MLIS program that had readings from Wikipedia. Most other professors forbid the use of it quite adamantly. Because of this, it was just beat into my head that Wikipedia was useless for research purposes and information found on it cannot be trusted. My opinion has changed from watching the video. Wales said that 'everyone should have free access to the sum of human knowledge' and that is quite a great goal to have. I did not realize that changes, etc. were done by a close-knit community who take their jobs very seriously and he also points out that people who write an encyclopedia for FUN tend to be smart, - I don't think anyone could disagree with that!
The fact that they handle controversial articles well, are quick to take action when someone does something bad (i.e. the skinhead example) and claim to not have the built-in biases that other encyclopedias and textbooks have makes me trust it a lot more. Verifying a wikipedia entry's references will always be necessary (and just a good practice) but at least I feel like I can use it with more confidence now.
This article provided an interesting history of blogs (in all honesty, I hate that word) and find it very neat that they sprung from sites that summarized new/interesting websites way back in 1996, when the Internet was much smaller obviously. I wonder if things like Digg are similar to this now or are there other sites that still do this? I really do not know but I would think it would be next to impossible because of the sheer size of the Internet.
I like the whole idea of 'co-evolution' instead of control when it comes to interaction between people on blogs. I can only assume that's a main draw of them and I am starting to see how they could really help for members of research projects, especially in medicine and other fields where timeliness of publication, etc. is very important.
I didn't really understand the whole 'having to go to the website' criticism of blogs. This is the only criticism metioned in the article and it is laughably minor. I wonder if other criticisms exist.
It is going to be more and more important for librarians of all types to know how to create and use blogs effectively. However, creating them is the easy part. Finding the time to keep them updated, etc. isn't so easy.
Using a wiki to manage a library instruction program...
This article provides a good definition and various uses of wikis in a very specific setting. The main idea I got from the article is that knowledge should be shared, coordinated and built upon and that's what wikis do. In the long run, I wonder what effect wikis and blogs will have on advances in science and technology.
Creating the academic library folksonomy...
Trying to 'catalog the Internet' seems like an impossible task but through social tagging of items from a variety of web sources (licensed databases, etc), it is a good replacement for the idea of cataloging. The article is right in that there is a lot of 'gray literature' out there. Right now at work, we have a subscription to the New York Academy of Medicine Gray Literature Report which arrives bimonthly to my email address and provides links to hundreds of gray articles, reports, etc. Here's a link to the most current report
This report helps but how do we really know what else is out there that would benefit the research being done in my department? Hopefully because of things like Zotera and citeulike which are somewhat easy to use and very helpful, more and more people will get turned onto tagging.
Wikipedia video
It's interesting that this class has been the only one in my MLIS program that had readings from Wikipedia. Most other professors forbid the use of it quite adamantly. Because of this, it was just beat into my head that Wikipedia was useless for research purposes and information found on it cannot be trusted. My opinion has changed from watching the video. Wales said that 'everyone should have free access to the sum of human knowledge' and that is quite a great goal to have. I did not realize that changes, etc. were done by a close-knit community who take their jobs very seriously and he also points out that people who write an encyclopedia for FUN tend to be smart, - I don't think anyone could disagree with that!
The fact that they handle controversial articles well, are quick to take action when someone does something bad (i.e. the skinhead example) and claim to not have the built-in biases that other encyclopedias and textbooks have makes me trust it a lot more. Verifying a wikipedia entry's references will always be necessary (and just a good practice) but at least I feel like I can use it with more confidence now.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Friday, November 14, 2008
Week 11 comments
Digital Libraries: Challenges and Influential Work
This article describes discusses the the powerful tools we have to access resources and the changes that are happening to make access more efficient. It is a good history lesson in how digital libraries really came about and how federal funds played a big part in what we have to work with now and what we will have in the future. I think it was very forward-thinking (which I don't normally say about the government) of the federal government to work with the NSF and NASA to fund DLI. A lot of technologies that complement the activities funded by the DLI were not federally funded too.
Federated searching seems to be an important issue that still needs to be addressed now.
One thing I was curious about in the article was how it discussed metadata searching v. full-text searching. I wonder if Google is doing or looking into being able to conduct both types of searching.
The last issue the article mentions are library portals and how the NISO Metasearch Initiative is trying to develop standards for libraries to have one-search access to multiple resources through an easy Google-type page. I sometimes have difficulty searching, for instance, the CLP site and think sometimes that it's too busy and takes too many clicks to actually get to what is needed. Having an easier way to search all of the data bases at one time would be a very good thing, especially since a lot of people are used to this type of searching/retrieving.
Dewey Meets Turing
This article sort of pits computer scientists against librarians and then resolves the issues each discipline faces in working together in the world of the DLI. It appears that both sides want to hold on to their traditional roles and still be able to move forward together and by the end of the article, it is clear that this is possible and is currently happening. Librarians of the future will be working even more closely with computer scientists in the emergent institutional repository realm, for instance. All librarians will have to be more forward-thinking and proactive to help find solutions to some problems that still remain and to know that they still have a very viable and important job to do, just like the computer scientists.
Institutional Repositories
Lynch wrote a very interesting article that stemmed from a talk he gave at a workshop on insitutional repositories and their role in scholarship. It does seem like institutional repositories, if handled properly, could really increase collaboration between different universities, especially when it comes to data sharing, etc. Right now, these collaborations can be very costly and unweildly, especially in medicine, where data bases, etc. have to be run and funded (sometimes at very high cost) through the grant. The money that could be saved here could be used for more actual research.
Another interesting thing about the article was the discussion of the increase in traditional journal articles having supplementary materials published online. This is both a blessing and a curse. The New England Journal of Medicine, for instance, has been doing this for a while now and has slowly gotten better with: 1) actually making it very clear in the article that there is some supplementary material available; and 2) being able to find and access this information well after the publication date. It appears that the supplementary material will be forever linked with the actual article. However, when one downloads the PDF of the article itself, the supplementary information is not there. A better system would have it all in the same file and then with the option for the user to print/save the supplementary material. Right now, the system is still a bit burdensome. Perhaps a better system would be to have all of this information in the author's institutional repository but then the question arises, would outsiders have access to it? Would the journal subscribers?
Just like Lynch mentions, institutional repositories have to be set up so as to further and enhance scholarly work, not make it more burdensome.
This article describes discusses the the powerful tools we have to access resources and the changes that are happening to make access more efficient. It is a good history lesson in how digital libraries really came about and how federal funds played a big part in what we have to work with now and what we will have in the future. I think it was very forward-thinking (which I don't normally say about the government) of the federal government to work with the NSF and NASA to fund DLI. A lot of technologies that complement the activities funded by the DLI were not federally funded too.
Federated searching seems to be an important issue that still needs to be addressed now.
One thing I was curious about in the article was how it discussed metadata searching v. full-text searching. I wonder if Google is doing or looking into being able to conduct both types of searching.
The last issue the article mentions are library portals and how the NISO Metasearch Initiative is trying to develop standards for libraries to have one-search access to multiple resources through an easy Google-type page. I sometimes have difficulty searching, for instance, the CLP site and think sometimes that it's too busy and takes too many clicks to actually get to what is needed. Having an easier way to search all of the data bases at one time would be a very good thing, especially since a lot of people are used to this type of searching/retrieving.
Dewey Meets Turing
This article sort of pits computer scientists against librarians and then resolves the issues each discipline faces in working together in the world of the DLI. It appears that both sides want to hold on to their traditional roles and still be able to move forward together and by the end of the article, it is clear that this is possible and is currently happening. Librarians of the future will be working even more closely with computer scientists in the emergent institutional repository realm, for instance. All librarians will have to be more forward-thinking and proactive to help find solutions to some problems that still remain and to know that they still have a very viable and important job to do, just like the computer scientists.
Institutional Repositories
Lynch wrote a very interesting article that stemmed from a talk he gave at a workshop on insitutional repositories and their role in scholarship. It does seem like institutional repositories, if handled properly, could really increase collaboration between different universities, especially when it comes to data sharing, etc. Right now, these collaborations can be very costly and unweildly, especially in medicine, where data bases, etc. have to be run and funded (sometimes at very high cost) through the grant. The money that could be saved here could be used for more actual research.
Another interesting thing about the article was the discussion of the increase in traditional journal articles having supplementary materials published online. This is both a blessing and a curse. The New England Journal of Medicine, for instance, has been doing this for a while now and has slowly gotten better with: 1) actually making it very clear in the article that there is some supplementary material available; and 2) being able to find and access this information well after the publication date. It appears that the supplementary material will be forever linked with the actual article. However, when one downloads the PDF of the article itself, the supplementary information is not there. A better system would have it all in the same file and then with the option for the user to print/save the supplementary material. Right now, the system is still a bit burdensome. Perhaps a better system would be to have all of this information in the author's institutional repository but then the question arises, would outsiders have access to it? Would the journal subscribers?
Just like Lynch mentions, institutional repositories have to be set up so as to further and enhance scholarly work, not make it more burdensome.
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