Readings for Week #5

(This week's reading gave me some pretty awful cataloging flashbacks - all of those acronyms came rushing back in a flood. AACR, MARC, & RDA, oh my! After a 2 year stint in cataloging, I knew that I was better suited for reference work. To all of those aspiring catalogers out there, I salute you!)

Database/ Wikipedia
This article was a fairly straight-forward explanation of what databases are (a collection of data), their varieties & how they're used. I've used with relational database management systems & software (Access, SQL), but I don't have that much experience with object DMS.

Introduction to Metadata / Gilliland & An Overview of the Dublin Core Data Model / Miller
Metadata is basically, "data about data." This term is used to describe how an object (or set of objects) is classified or found or managed in a specific setting/organization. In many academic libraries, Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) is used, while some school & public libraries use Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC). A lucky few of us who work in special libraries end up creating special in-house systems.  Tagging in user-generated environments (blogs, wikis, etc) comes pretty close to what metadata is about. Having good metadata is enormously important for accessibility, whether you are in an academic, public or special library. Let's say you are searching for an Italian cookbook in your library. You've checked the online catalog & found the call number associated with "cooking, Italian" is TX723. In LCSH, TX means "home economics" and the number range 642-840 describes specific methods or varieties of cooking. If the online catalog has more complete records available for public view, you can also see author & publisher information, physical details about the item (format, pages, illustrations, photos), physical location, & other classification schemes. On the cataloger side, one can see all of that information as well as machine readable fields (MARC) that make that item accessible to external databases. The public can see Batali, Mario in the Author field, while a cataloger or external database can see his name in the 100 field represented this way: 100 1 Batali, Mario.
Unfortunately, as thorough as it is, LCSH (or any other cataloging scheme) can't possibly accurately describe data for every discipline. That's where the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative comes in. This initiative is proposing standardized metadata that can be used across disciplines, languages & also internationally. As you can see from my lengthy LCSH example above, each information community has their own language & terms that may not easily or ever translate to another community - even if they're describing the same objects. The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set is the basic set of fifteen components used for resource description, ranging from "creator" to "type."

Readings for Wk #4

Data Compression / Wikipedia & Data Compression Basics / DVD-HQ
These clearly written & easy to understand articles on data compression covered some basics I am familiar with:

• Compression can help save bandwidth & disk space - very important for those of us with limited computing power. Compression allows you to be a better steward of resources.

• In order for data compression to be successful, both the sender & receiver must understand how the information is encoded
• You probably won't be able to play WMA music files on some MP3 players - the files will have to be converted first.

But the articles also raised some important points that I wasn't aware of:

• Lossless compression - original data can be retrieved
• Lossy compression - loses some of the data so it can be compressed, but the results are not the same as the original. This is like making a copy of  copy - the more copies you make of the copy, the less it looks like the original.

As we librarians digitize & share more information, we have to be sure we're using the right formats/techniques for our users.

 Imaging Pittsburgh / Galloway


This article emphasizes the importance of collaboration, planning, metadata. I appreciated how he explained all of the challenges (metadata, selection, website) involved in this project & how they arrived at solutions that were accepted by all collaborators. The resulting website is impressive & demonstrates how important projects like these are to not only libraries & historical societies, but also to the public.

Youtube & Libraries / Webb

This article on using Youtube for library marketing, promotion, & instruction is pretty timely for me professionally. In the near future my web committee will be creating a Youtube channel to promote our career center's services, events, & tips on career planning. Youtube (in addition to Facebook) is probably one of the best ways to get the attention of our target undergraduate audience - it's free, the students use Youtube already, & there are relatively few administrative hoops we'd have to jump through.