Assignment 3: Personal Bibliographic Management Systems

Citeulike

Unit 6

Sorry this is late, my wife was in a car wreck Thursday afternoon and this is the first time I have had a chance to focus on some school. I will be posting the assignment once I have it written up.

L.A.N.
*A network covering a small geographical area characterized by high transfer rates.
*Earliest L.A.N. came to us from Xerox in 1973. Other early systems included Cambridge University and ARCNET by Datapoint Coorp.
*As a side note, if you have never been to a L.A.N. party, go if you get the chance.

Computer Network
*A group of interconnected computers. A network is can be classified based on their size Local, Wide and Metropolitan Area Networks.
*Further classification can be define a network based on how devices are connected, functional relationship and topology..
*I never realized the how many types of networks existed, the resources did a nice job of explaining them and how they are classified.

RFID
*Uses radio frequency to track objects that have the tag attached or contained in it.
*Certainly has some potential in a library setting such as inventory control and theft prevention.
*I would be interested in the cost efficiency of a system like this though. A company I worked for had looked into an RFID system for inventory control and tracking patient information but it was cost prohibitive.
*Originally created by a Soviet scientist who developed it for the K.G.B.

Blog Comments:

https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=3413864360557025238&postID=5401832781746000853&page=1

https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=1129785935180596689&postID=7650461811986294684&page=1

Muddiest point: As a result of the countries heightened awareness of security, the idea of giving up private rights and liberties has come to the forefront of public debate. In the long run, will the debate lead to further advances in technologies such as RFID, or will it be the end?

Data Compression.

· Amazing to think of the amount of work involved in what seems so effortless when we use it.

· Was not aware there are different types of compression.

o Lossless provides a higher quality of reconstruction and is necessary for things where data integrity is important such as spreadsheets or programs.

o Lossy will clip data reducing its quality and is particularly useful video and audio data. A degree of quality can be maintained based on the physiological limitations.

· The DVD-HQ article helped clarify some of the questions I had about the wiki article, and broke things down rather nicely. While it was more detailed the author did a great job through examples of helping make the idea more concrete.

Imaging Pittsburgh: Creating a shared gateway to digital image collections of the Pittsburgh region

Was a great overview of the magnitude of such a task, and I think the site was well worth the efforts. I was particularly impressed when discussing how the various challenges presented by three separate institutions, Archives Service Center of the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania were handled and the project was able to move ahead in digitizing collections of this size.

YouTube

Very good article. This is one resource that I never considered to be a resource before; the author presented some solid suggestions on how to use the service to promote the library and information literacy. I can see how the use of such a site/service can easily be used to open a library to new users, or be used to help educate them; similar to a Randy Pausch “head-fake”.

Blog comments:

Comment 1

Comment 2

Muddiest point: I am absolutely horrible with math and have always shied away from it, the Theory section of the wiki article on data compression was a bit beyond what I have been exposed to and left me somewhat confused. Even the second articles use of abbreviations was a bit much, I found myself doing a bit of “window sliding”.

Here is the link to my digitization project on Flickr, if anyone has a problem viewing it please let me know.

PLease Stand by, we are having technical issues.

Having som eproblems with my connection this evening, I will repost when it is back up.

Blogging from a cell phone FTL =(

Week 3

I found the articles informative while not intimidating for someone who has only average exposure to computers and very limited experience with anything not Windows based.

Linux seems to have a fairly popular following among people even if it has not necessarily broken through to the mainstream. It seems highly customizable for those that are tech savvy and have some programming background, or at least very patient and willing to learn.

I do have some minor experience with Mac Os, and it was all positive. I enjoyed working on such a well integrated and powerful platform with what seemed like far superior multimedia applications. Once you can stop thinking in a Windows state of mind it was much less intimidating. I had hoped to make the change to a Mac system at home, but the costs just seemed to be prohibitive. The article seemed to have a more technical focus but did a good job making it informative and consumable for a layperson.

The Windows article was probably more of a refresher for what many Windows users have experienced as a captive audience to Microsoft. I have no actual problem with MS, from a business perspective their success is something to be studied (except for the whole anti-trust thing, but there are many views on that) and replicated, from the consumer perspective they do make good products, from the I.S. stand point they made a product that opened up computers to the masses.

Muddiest point: Nothing really this week, most of the material was fairly strait forward.