Week 12 Muddiest Point

I have no muddy points for this week.

Week 12 Reading Notes

Prior to reading Blossom's article I never thought much about social media. It is interesting that collaborative projects via the World Wide Web aid in learning and human progress. Hopefully I can find a way to become part of this movement and receive feedback for any work I produce. The fact that I could use my Facebook account as a means to promote learning or research is fascinating and something I may look into doing in the future. As for the remark about using blogs to turn a profit, I nor any of my friends who post blogs do that. I still am unsure of how to look into gaining a profit from a blog though I'm sure more about this will be revealed as people keep collaborating on the World Wide Web.

Allan's article shows the roles wikis could play in an academic environment. As an undergraduate I took a course on the history of Central Asia in which one of the collective learning projects we could do was create and manage a Wikipedia page that focused on some aspect of Central Asian history. This is a good way to promote the spread of discussion toward any academic topic. The only problem I see is dealing with the people who may troll the entries and change them to whatever they want. If the entries are restricted only to scholars, though, then they are not serving their purpose. It will be interesting to see the direction collaborative learning and research via wikis goes over the next few years.

The idea of social tagging looks like an excellent one for people doing research. If people look up one source online, they can see several complimentary sources tagged to the one they looked up. More than just promoting sharing, library patrons now have the ability to see similar sources to the ones they looked up, thus strengthening whatever research they did. Arch also acknowledges the problem that spam tagging presents to those doing research and potential methods to deal with people TROLLing the wiki entry. I thought that her explanation of what when problems arise makes social tagging a key element of scholarly research in the digital world.

The video of Jimmy Wales' presentation shows how active Wikipedia is and how different it is from traditional encyclopedias. While Wikipedia is free for everyone to use people can easily change the information presented in an entry to whatever they want it to say regardless of the facts. It was good to see Wales acknowledge the weaknesses Wikipedia has and how to circumvent them in addition to the benefits Wikipedia gives the scholarly community. I also liked the explanation of how Wikipedia leads to communitity involvement and how peers, whether scholars or not, play a role in moderating entries and keeping them at least quasi-accurate. I had no idea that the changes to entries could be tracked so well. While I wouldn't use Wikipedia for scholarly research I would turn to it if I had a generalized question about a topic. Wales' explanation for future use of Wikipedia as a collaborative means of scholarship sounds like it holds more academic potential than experts claim, though it will take much further development and collaboration to make it a reality.

Week 11 Muddiest Point

Given that I completed assignment 6, I have no muddiest point to elaborate on.

Here it is: Assignment 6 - My website

Working on this assignment gave me a new appreciation for the websites people do. Publishing one is a lot of work and given how convoluted the whole process is, making an appealing website is quite a challenge. On an additional note, the embedding code I posted for my Youtube work didn't embed properly but the hyperlinks in the code still work so you can click on them to see the three Youtube videos I was involved with.

http://www.pitt.edu/~afc16/Site/Welcome.html

Week 10 Muddiest Point

I read up about the different kinds of markup languages one can use to design a Web page; there are a lot more of them than I previously expected. Is there anything that makes HTML stand out from the other markup languages that results in it being the one most commonly used to design websites?

week 10 Readings

When I saw the search diagram I found it somewhat overwhelming at first. As I kept reading the article it made more sense though. I never really thought that searches on the web were that complex. I also was surprised to see that the emergent digital library technologies from 1994 were still used today. I don't know if this means libraries are falling behind technologically or if they are ahead of what is expected. I also think the metasearch initiative will help make it easier for people to conduct searches not just in a library setting but at home as well.

Paepke's article shows the importance digital technology has for a variety of fields. As someone with a BA in History, I never really thought much about how digital technology affected the realm of historical research though the article really showed me how they go hand in hand. I also found it interesting that the libraries struggled to get research funding for it while the sciences achieved it easily. The sciences have money and PR to get what they need and I am not sure why more libraries haven't sought to have stronger PR with their communities to get the funding they want. Does this also mean that librarians should also become computer programmers? It is an interesting issue.

Lynch starts off by mentioning that scholars are moving beyond traditional passive user means of conducting research and scholarship and instead plan to work on a more active approach to scholarly activity. I also found it interesting that an institutional repository went beyond just hardware and software. Lynch's call for libraries to extend from traditional means of scholarship and record keeping and think about the potential digitization holds for them is an audacious yet intriguing one. I think the potential it brings with collection and distribution strategies is strong and beneficial for those who use them. I also found it beneficial that he mentioned ways that a digital repository can fail over time. His call for partnering up at the end of the article also touches on the importance teamwork can bring for a repository. With the teamwork comes added PR and the smoothing out of things that are amiss with the repository. Lynch's points are well backed up and it is very important that libraries follow them to make th emost out of the new digital world.

Koha: an interesting library cataloging option

At the bottom of this post is the URL to my Koha assignment. At first I found Koha very user unfriendly, though once I figured out how to properly search for things and save barcodes it worked out just fine. It seems like a good service for librarians to use. I would not recommend it for patrons, though, given how difficult using it was. If the interface was more user friendly I would swear by it. While it will probably get better over time I would not recommend it to patrons unless it becomes more user friendly.

http://upitt04-staff.kwc.kohalibrary.com/cgi-bin/koha/virtualshelves/shelves.pl