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

Week 10 Reading Notes

This week I greatly enjoyed Doug Tidwell's "Introduction to XML" article - Finally, an article about programming that does not presume tons of background information! And is written in normal English! I especially enjoyed Section 4, "Defining document content," which did a good job of describing DTD, Document Type Definition.

Although Ogbuji's "A survey of XML standards" presumed too much background information, it gave me a clear description on the process by which certain coding practices become standards. And his article thoughtfully gathered different standards communities together and described their different standards-making processes one-by-one. This is a useful tool for anyone who would like to know what goes in behind the scenes.

I strongly believe that I am learning more from actually doing the labs, and not that much from the readings. When I follow Evgeny's labs step-by-step, and actually do the work, then I understand the material.

There is an old Chinese proverb on learning that goes: "To hear is to forget. To see is to remember. To do is to understand." I think these learning principles can still be applied to learning 21st century programming languages! I would like to see LIS 2600 developed such that there is very little reading, but longer and richer screencasts, with more complicated labs.

Week 9 Reading Notes

I am very excited about some of HTML5's new features, particularly (a) semantic replacements for generic block and inline elements; and (b) the ability to script APIs. (a) will make coding more user-friendly; and (b) will help programmers plug-in more cutting edge APIs more easily.

I am surprised that the HTML5 syntax is no longer based on SGML . . . Might there be problems for browsers to read HTML5, in the light that most browsers were programmed to read older versions of HTML? I wonder whether WHATWG coordinates with browser programmers to make interoperability a living reality, and not just a fancy idea!

There is an HTML5 browser test that seems to show Google Chrome and Firefox leading the way! Yay for Chrome users =) .

Week 8 Lab

Revised Index File:

New CSS Style File:

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