Week 3 Lab

http://www.citeulike.org/user/ehsue1/library

Week 4 Reading Notes

This week's readings were hard, very hard. They raised more questions for me than they did in providing answers.

The reason why they were hard is because I believe we had a bunch of database information thrown at us, but without a proper framework for us to judge which information was most relevant to libraries, which were not.

For example, in the Wikipedia article about databases, a list of 18 databases are mentioned, from active, cloud, distributed, federated, to even an "unstructured-data" database.

I really wish we could have another reading or some sense of which database is most relevant for libraries, and which databases are most often used in libraries, and for what purpose.

The only reading that I could grasp and try to apply in the real world was the entity-relationship model reading. This seems to bear upon the semantic web, a topic in which I already have background knowledge. However, I feel for those without background knowledge, this is going to be hard as well.

I really hope our lecture next week gives us a framework on how the structure of databases can apply in the real world!

Week 2 Lab - Jing Screencast and Flickr URLs

Screencast - http://screencast.com/t/jqO46KA68

Flickr via Jing photo - http://flic.kr/p/beQxtX

Week 3 Reading Notes

Eliminating Wealth and Language Barriers to Discoverability

While reading Anne Gilliland's introductory piece on metadata, I started to think about two "problems" that currently exist in library-land.

First, some metadata schemes like MARC or EAD are " . . . complex, time consuming, and resource intensive, and may only be justifiable when there is a legal mandate[.]" This reminded me of the fact that, at my present library, in order for books or digital materials to be enumerated in our collection, we are required to buy the MARC records. This affects us, because the number of books we have also affects our institution's academic ranking. This also reminded me that, on the Internet, one often must pay a certain fee to Google in order to appear on the first page of search results.

I wonder whether the next grand step for librarianship is to champion discoverability as a mandate that is just as important as access. In fact, the two go hand-in-hand; it does no good for a patron to have access if s/he cannot discover anything. And if there are wealth barriers which libraries must jump over to make their items discoverable, then perhaps we should break them, just as we (or at least some of us) championed OA on the principle of universal access.

Which of course brings us to Dublin Core, which is OA, but does not seem to be multilingual. In order to fully discover stuff, and maximize the flattening of distance technology affords, we need an interoperable multilingual metadata scheme. The problem then becomes such a scheme would cost money. However, I wonder whether we can upload videos to educate savvy patrons on how to craft sophisticated folksonomies. The scheme should be OS as well.

This would not necessarily put OCLC's new endeavor out of business! We as librarians should support hybrid OS & private business endeavors. However, we should get the source code out there so that innovative information professionals anywhere can eliminate the language barrier without charging a fee.

Week 2 Reading Notes

After reading the NY Times article on European libraries' efforts to digitize, the "cataloger" inside me became greatly disturbed. I understand that, in an effort to get money from a variety of sources, every individual European library needs to make private alliances with variety of funders.

However, this seems that the final end product of digitization will be a scattered and patchwork network of European digital libraries. That would preclude a one-stop-shop model for European works, which I personally prefer for its simplicity.

Hopefully, after the vast digitization work is done, the majority of European libraries can join a single consortium and create a single search engine or index for all their works. That would be more efficient and save more time, than requiring everyone to enter separate URLs for separate search engines.

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