Week 14 - Reading Notes

No Place to Hide

This multimedia site illustrates one of the great dilemmas and paradoxes the U.S. faces now: To what extent should the need for security trump the constitutional right to privacy? Because consulting firms (who employ many information professionals like ourselves) exist to analyze who we are, what our income is, and what our consumer preferences are, I believe Viet Dinh (the primary drafter of the Patriot Act) correctly observed: "I think that in a democratic government, we should always distrust governmental authority." This is my personal position as well.

"TIA"

Is anyone else scandalized by how out of date TIA's website is? Under "Latest News," the most recent entry reads "March 1, 2005." Keeping an eye on our government is a noble goal - but one should stay current!!!

Protecting Privacy Rights in Libraries

Judah Hamer courageously stands for an absolute right of privacy for patrons: in their reading habits, in their lending records, against the government. I believe the ALA might not have done a vigorous enough job in lobbying on behalf of library patron confidentiality in the wake of September 11. And in the limited circumstance of pre-teens being able to read what they want without parental supervision -- I think librarians should support freedom of information in this context without reserve.

Week 13 Lab

http://liswiki.org/wiki/User:Edh25

Week 13 Reading Notes

The creation of user-generated content that consistently shows great quality is the great success of Wikipedia. In fact, studies have shown that user-created folksonomies overlap with 80% of LOC Subject Headings, a controlled vocabulary. See Yi, Kwan, and Chan Lois Mai. "Linking Folksonomy to Library of Congress Subject Headings: an Exploratory Study." Journal of Documentation 65, no. 6 (2009): 872-900.

However, even though the technology for creating user-generated content may be free sometimes, sometimes that software also comes with a wealth barrier. Probably the most user-friendly OPAC which permits patrons to tag and comment on particular books, "Library Thing for Libraries," also has a steep annual subscription price depending on how many students make up your FTE. I am glad for Wikipedia . . . But for libraries to take advantage of OS-based software and technologies, there still seems to be an initial investment cost that seems hard to justify in the era of economic downturn. Therefore, I personally am not as optimistic as Blossom and Allan, because many of these technologies, despite having a Creative Commons or OS-basis, have quickly erected wealth barriers of their own.

Second, in some instances, a user-generated Wiki-textbook is simply inappropriate. I work in a law library. Here, we must teach students how to identify who are the most authoritative voices in a certain field of law. Because of the hierarchical nature of the field of law, we cannot sustain an egalitarian or simply ignorant manner of information transmission for very long. I'm sorry to appear hierarchical, but I think that's simply a function of the way law works.

Week 12 Reading Notes

This week, David Hawking's article Web Search Engines Parts 1 & 2 presumed way too much background knowledge. I tried my very best to follow it, but he used too much nomenclature without defining those terms. However, it gave me a general idea of what happens -- crawling and indexing -- each time I enter a search into an engine.

My most favorite articles by far were Shreeves' Current Developments and Future Trends for the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting and Bergman's White Paper - The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value. I am so glad that most repositories seem to be implementing the OAI Protocol as a general standard! This will vastly improve findability and put libraries on the same page as each other. I hope that the OAI Registry will help libraries see which resources other libraries have already digitized, so that other libraries have no need to spend tons of money to digitize them again. This will help prevent redundancy.

The description of BrightPlanet's functions fascinated me -- really, a search engine that could capture dynamically generated sites??!! This sounds very powerful. I wanted to dry this out, but when I went to BrightPlanet's site, unfortunately, it seemed that one had to subscribe to this content. Might anyone know how to get in touch with them for a free trial?

Week 11 Lab

Web of Science

Query:

Topic: ~virtual reference

Refined to Web of Science Category, "Information Science Library Science"

2008-2012

Web of Science

Query:

Topic: "digital library"

2008-2012

Google Scholar

Query:

~virtual reference

2008-2012

Articles excluding patents

Google Scholar

Query:

"digital library"

2008-2012

Articles excluding patents

Week 11 Reading Notes

First of all, it was great to see all my old classmates yesterday night! I look forward to seeing you again in the summer!

Out of this week's 3 readings, Paepcke et al.'s Dewey Meets Turing and Lynch's Institutional Repositories greatly benefited me with a Cliff Notes summary on the past 10 years of shared experience between computer scientists and librarians. I felt great ambivalence to discover that the search mechanics behind Google started out supported by a federally funded grant, under DLI. If public monies first supported DLI, why weren't the powerful algorithms made open source?? Or at least revealed through a Creative Commons license which would still have afforded the authors the opportunity to profit? My take is, if public monies funded the project, then the fruits of that research should be known publicly, for the commonweal. Instead, Google is now a private entity grossing $400+ per share and whose algorithms are kept secret, under wraps. Frustrating!!

Second, I think Lynch blathers on rather incoherently and redundantly. He does not articulate in a compelling fashion how classic and revolutionary librarianship principles apply to the brave new world created through the marriage of CS and librarianship. His work seems to play catch-up with what computer scientists are already envisioning. We as librarians need to (a) first build a strong foundation of classic librarianship principles - (e.g., Ranganathan's Five Principles); and (b) think about how new IT can creatively deliver access and organization to the information flood. We need more librarianship substance and IT savvy-ness, not mere blundering about in the dark with fancy rhetoric.

I completely lost respect for Mischo's piece when it contained this dead link (http://www.niso.org/committees/MetaSearch-info.html). For those interested, the correct link is http://www.niso.org/workrooms/mi. There should be some sort of mechanism to help one find new permalinks that replace old ones!

Week 9 Lab

http://www.pitt.edu/~edh25/lab9.html