Week 14: Organizational Computing, Cloud Computing, and the Future

1- 2. Gruman and Norr, "What Cloud Computing Really Means" and "Explaining Cloud Computing"

The Info World article appears to nail this one: cloud computing seems to be a buzz concept. Though I'm not underestimating how useful cloud computing can be, I see it as another piece of the pie - not a new pie.

While the Explaining Computers video does a fine job of ... uh ... explaining this, another Info World article is also helpful in understanding the concept.

3. The Future of Libraries: Beginning the Great Transformation

Well ... this stuff is fun to think about sometimes ... While the wholesale disappearance of literacy is something I cannot agree with, a changing literacy is. In a similar article in the New York Times Magazine, Wired "maverick" Kevin Kelly discusses the transition to "screen literacy" which itself shares many of the same characteristics and functions with what he considers traditional "textual literacy." In other words, the basic principles in how we communicate through text are still pertinent to how we communicate visually - but the technology has changed and there are still hurdles to overcoming the unique demands of "screen literacy."

What I quite like about Frey's predictions are his emphasis that libraries should explore "creative spaces" and provide access to more hand-on, studio-type activities and his emphasis on preserving local history. To me, these are two major holes left by information technology that libraries should fill in order to remain relevant physical institutions. Of course, this comes with increased outreach and interaction on the part of library staff - another suggestion I would make if writing this article.

One last consideration here is thinking beyond our need for any technology to communicate. At what point can our physiology or power of cognition adapt to communicate telepathically or to meld with technology. For further consideration, see below:

Videodrome (1983)

Dark City (1998)

Long live the new flesh ...

Week 11 Comments

here and here

Week 11 - Digital Library - Institutional Repositories

1. Mischo, W. (July/August 2005). Digital Libraries: challenges and influential work. D-Lib Magazine. 11(7/8).

An interesting review of how these technologies have evolved ... perhaps the most telling point in this article is the amount of standards developed outside of federally-funded research projects. The line between the academy and popular or business development is always a blurry one when it comes to technological development as advancement gets absorbed by the marketplace.

2. Paepcke, A. et al. (July/August 2005). Dewey meets Turing: librarians, computer scientists and the digital libraries initiative. D-Lib Magazine. 11(7/8).

While reading this piece, I couldn't help but recall our discussions of The Social Life of Information in our other courses. The discussion of how librarians had to "humanize" technology - and get over technophobe anxiety - is especially indicative of this. More importantly, though, is the general relationship of the institutions of THE LIBRARY and COMPUTER SCIENCE and how this seemingly wasn't as prominent? If that is what the authors are arguing I would disagree that this relationship is something that happened in 1994 due to the DL projects. I have the impression that libraries, especially in the the late 20th century, have been involved in offering new technologies to their communities. Does anyone else feel this way?

3. Lynch, Clifford A. "Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age" ARL, no. 226 (February 2003): 1-7.

I was particularly drawn to what the author sees as failures of institutions to disseminate knowledge. While working as a research assistant for a faculty member in another program, I ran up against the issue of "lost" articles that she and other scholars had written in the '70s and '80s. In some cases, her personal filing cabinet was more efficient than the university databases in tracking down specific types of subject matter and sources. The uneven nature of dissemination and preservation was very evident.

Week 10 Comments

available here and here and here

Assignment 6 - Web page

The Committee Online is available here

Muddiest Point - Week Nine

The class lecture on XML - with all of the examples - helped me a good bit, but for this week I'll just say that XML is a big muddy point that I need to work through by using it.

I guess in general, it seems this is useful for applying to databases, what else are useful applications for it?

Week 10 - Web Search and OAI Protocol

1. David Hawking , Web Search Engines: Part 1 and Part 2 IEEE Computer, June 2006.
Very nice, simple articles providing an overview to web searching here ... In the first part, I was interested in mechanics of crawling. It all makes sense given the size of the web. I am particularly pleased by the idea of "politeness" because ... well ... it's just nice to be polite. Part II discusses many of the details behind indexing. Even in this simplified form, the intricacies of indexing appear really tedious. Again the amount of tools needed to harness the web is large, but not surprisingly so.

2. Shreeves, S. L., Habing, T. O., Hagedorn, K., & Young, J. A. (2005). Current developments and future trends for the OAI protocol for metadata harvesting. Library Trends, 53(4), 576-589.
Although this article is a few years old, it seems that I would be hesitant to begin adopting the OAI protocols until the dust settles. As the authors point out, there seem to be (big, in my opinion) gaps in the registry. I am interested to find out what's happened in the three years since this publication.

3. MICHAEL K. BERGMAN, “The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value”
Bergman's seafaring analogy for the deep web conjures images of The Abyss and makes this vast amount of information an undiscovered territory. His investigation into what constitutes a "deep web" site is equally fascinating - and somewhat alarming. His observation of the increasing growth of the "deep web" make me wonder how web searching will change to accommodate this growth.