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!