Muddiest Point - Week of November 27, 2012

I do not have a muddiest point for this week.

Reading Notes - Week of November 26, 2012

Schrier, Robert A. "Digital Librarianship & Social Media: The Digital Library as a Conversation Facilitator." D-Lib Magazine 17. No. 7/8 (2011).

• librarian have become aware that digital collections are often underutilized by their intended user base
• one of the best ways to promote digital library collections is through social media, but many librarians do not use it correctly
• five principles to integrate a social networking plan into a digital library context
• listen
• find out where the conversations are and what is being said
• identify the people central to the conversation and engage with them
• platforms for listening - Google Alerts, RSS feeds, Twitter, etc.
• understand language and cultural norms
• participation
• social networking allows digital librarians to put a human face to their collections
• establish trust with users
• Transparency
• transparency reinforces positive relationships with users
• Policy
• libraries should consider developing a social media policy
• Planning
• libraries should plan social networking ahead of time

Allan, Charles. "Using a Wiki to Manage a Library Instruction Program: Sharing Knowledge to Better Serve Patrons." C&RL News 68. No. 2 (2007).

• creating wikis is easy
• free wikis are not very complex, but can be effective
• the use of wikis in the workplace is just beginning to catch on, and the deployment of wikis in libraries is starting
• wikis in libraries are used to manage a variety of information

Arch, Xan. "Creating the Academic Library Folksonomy: Put Social Tagging to Work at Your Institution." C&RL News 68. No. 2 (2007).

• social tagging allows an individual to create bookmarks (tags) for websites and save them online
• websites allow these bookmarks to be shared and new resources to be discovered
• this should be brought into libraries

I watched Jimmy Wales' TED Talk on the birth of Wikipedia.

Muddiest Point - week of November 19, 2012

I have no muddiest point for this week.

Reading Notes - Week of November 19, 2012

 Hawking, David. "Web Search Engines: Part 1." Computer 39. no. 6 (2006): 86-88.

• large search engines operate out of geographically distributed data centers for redundancy
• there are hundreds of thousands of servers at these centers
• within each data center groups of servers can be dedicated to specific functions, such as web crawling
• large scale replication is necessary
• the simplest crawling algorithm uses queues of URLs and a mechanism to determine whether it has seen the URL before
• crawling algorithms must address speed, politeness, excluded content, duplicate content, continuous crawling and spam rejection

Hawking, David. "Web Search Engines: Part" Computer 39. no. 8 (2006): 88-90.

• search engine use an inverted file to rapidly identify indexing terms
• an inverted file is a concatenation of the posting lists for each term
• indexers create inverted files in two phases
• scanning - indexer scans the text of each input document
• inversion - indexer sorts the files into term number order
• real indexers have to deal with scaling, term lookup, compression, searching phrases, anchor texts, link popularity scores, and query-independent scoring
• query processing algorithms
• query processors looks up each query term and locates its posting list

Shreeves, Sarah, Thomas G. Habing, Kat Hagedorn, and Jeffery A. Young. "Current Developments and Future Trends for the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting." Library Trends 53. no. 4 (2005): 576-589.

• the Protocol for Metadata Harvesting is a tool developed to facilitate interoperability between different collections of metadata based on common standards
• the OAI world is divided into data providers or repositories and service providers or harvesters
• OAI requires data providers to expose metadata in at least unqualified Dublin Core
• the Protocol can provide access to parts of the "invisible Web" that not easily accessible to search engines

Bergman, Michael K. "The Deep Web: Surfing Hidden Value," Journal of Electronic Publishing 7. no.1 (2001).

• deep web sources store their content in searchable databases that only produce results dynamically in response to a direct request
• deep web is much larger than the "surface" web

Muddiest Point - Week of November 12, 2012

I do not have a muddiest point for this week.

Muddiest Point - Week of November 5th, 2012

I do not have a muddiest point for this week...although that might change once I really begin to use XML.

Also, I apologize for being a bit tardy with this post. I forgot that yesterday was Wednesday!

Reading Notes - Week of November 5, 2012

Martin Bryan. An Introduction to the Extensible Markup Language (XML)

• What is XML?
• XML is subset of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) designed to aid the interchange of structured documents over the Internet
• XML files always clearly mark where the start and end of each of the logical parts (called elements) of an interchanged document occurs
• it restricts the use of SGML constructs to ensure that fall back options are available when access to certain components of the document is not currently possible over the Internet
• through document type definition, XML allows user to ensure that each component of document occurs in a valid place within the interchanged data stream
• XML does not require the presence of DTD
• XML allows users to link multiple files together to form compound documents, identify when illustrations are to be incorporated into text files, provide processing control information to support programs, and add editorial comments to files
• XML is not designed to be a standard way of coding text
• The Components of XML?
• based on the concept of documents and comprised of entities
• each entity can contain one or more element
• each element has certain attributes which describe how it should be processed
• How is XML Used?
• users need to know how the markup tags are delimited from normal text and in which order the various elements should be used in
• Systems that understand XML can provide users with lists of the elements that are valid at each point in the document, and will automatically add the required delimiters to the name to produce a markup tag
• When a system does not understand XML, users can enter the XML tags manually for later validation. 

Uche Ogbuji. A survey of XML standards: Part 1. January 2004.

There are many different standards for XML. Be aware of this when using XML, or reviewing software that uses XML.

I have reviewed Extending Your Markup: An XML Tutorial by Andre Bergholz and W3School WML Schema Tutorial, and will refer to them when working with XML in this coming week.