LIS 2600 Course Blog: April 2012

Monday, April 16, 2012

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Is anyone else scandalized by how out of date TIA's website is?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

Monday, April 9, 2012

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.

Monday, April 2, 2012

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?