Muddiest Point

Muddiest Point: I remember Z39.50 being briefly introduced in my organizing and retrieving info class, but for some reason I associated it with MARC records. Is there a place in MARC fields that specifies Z39.50 standards?

Readings for Access in Digital Libraries Part II (10/26)

The Chapter regarding definitions and origins of the Open Archive Initiative I believe to be important for anyone considering librarianship as a career. Digitizing documents is both time consuming and expensive, especially for the equipment, so it's fundamentally a good thing that libraries can share documents through tools like the OAI. Not only does it disseminate information to a larger audience, but non-programming librarians can have a better concept of technical concepts related to digital collections. Also, the importance of useful metadata should not be over-exaggerated, which is the overarching goal of the OAI; to provide descriptive metadata.

The Todd Miller article on federated searching seems to be unavailable through the Library Journal's archives, as the link no longer works, and I tried (unsuccessfully) to locate it on my own.


The article by Clifford Lynch regarding Z39.50 standards is very useful to the technical side of librarianship. The standard, developed by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), is used to specify data structures and rules applied to database searching that allows a client to retrieve records from a server machine. First developed in the 1980's, the most current version of Z39.50 was adopted in 1995, and sometimes referred to as version 3. Basically, the standard is meant for compatibility reading between the client and server alone, and doesn't accommodate third parties. One key aspect to remember, is that the standard doesn't deal with any database management or user interface issues, but simply the protocol interaction between the two machines.

The article by Norbert Lossau was a refreshing break from all the computer-tech jargon of the previous articles. Examining an issue of grand proportions for academic libraries, Lossau notes the importance of relevant search strategies for digital documents. He stresses the importance of libraries taking control of developing meaningful search engines, so that they don't get left behind in the digital shadow of giants like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Something that struck me in the reading was his mention of a survey conducted in November 2002, noting that students still make extensive use of online library database searching, but would much rather do it through interfaces like Google's. I found this especially interesting, because most people need at least minimal training to effectively navigate through digital library catalogs. Google's algorithm eliminates the need for Boolean search strategies like using AND and OR, and doesn't need to specify fields like "author," although there are useful applications of such strategies.

Week 6 Muddiest Point

From part two of the Hawking article: "There is a strong economic incentive for search engines to use caching to reduce the cost of answering queries."

I would like clarification about what is involved in this process, and what caching really is. I just thought it was like cookies that are sent to individual IPs and stored on the server until deleted.

Week 6 Readings

The article by Henzinger et al., Challenges in Web Search Engines, examines some problems with search engines that I never considered before. Of course, it's obvious with all the advertisements popping up on the query result pages that money runs the operation, and the more you have, the more people will see your website. I was unaware of the term "spam" being applied to search engines, however. As with some algorithms, the most popular web pages appear first in the query list. With others, it appears authors and publishers of these sites have bought their ticket to popularity, which will ultimately lead to more links to that page by all other algorithms.

Part One of the Hawking article focuses on generic terms related to web searches. While I found some of his diagrams to be a little confusing, he supports them with several definitions, such as URL, crawling, indexes, spamming, and hashing function as they apply to search engines. He spends a great deal of time examining web crawling and various forms of crawling, which filters previously generated search results from the same and related queries. The second part of this article examines the process indexing by crawling by search engines, namely Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft (GYM). Typically, there are two steps to indexing by algorithms. First, the "indexer" scans the text of documents. Next, it sorts the numbered results by "inversion" in term number order, with the document secondarily numbered. Hawking also describes processes later in the indexing process, such as scaling and compression, for ease of storage.

Assignment #2b

Here is the URL for images I changed in resolution:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/54552457@N04/sets/72157624972182591/

Week 5 Muddiest Point

The Ogbuji article lists several sources for XML tutorials and guides, and several seem to have similar content. I wonder which one would be recommended for the type of work related to this class.

Week 5 Readings

The Martin Bryan article talked about BURKS, the Brighton University Resource Kit for Students, which from 1997-2001 provided students of computing who had little or no internet access the necessary resources for learning different programming languages. While the collection dropped in sales once broadband internet became readily available, the tutorials still offer a dictionary of computing terms and a copy of the Mandrake 8.0 Linux distribution.

The next article, by Uche Oqbuji, gives a pretty well defined list of sources and tutorials to go to for XML. The lsit of technologies included XML 1.0, XML introduction tutorials, catalogs, namespaces, XML base, XInclude, among other standards. I will definitely keep this article handy for future reference when it comes to XML standards and tutorials for beginners. From my understanding, it would seem that Schematron would be a useful tool because you don't have to start from the root nodes and work your way up.

The tutorial by Bergholz was also informative to the XML beginner, as he explains the functionality of XML to the final product. He also mentions the basic structure of SGML and how HTML is written to markup the appearance of a document, and has nothing to do with the content.

The XML Schema Tutorial shows the nature of XML structure. It also explained the nature of the applied elements in the structure, and the functionality of specific commands.