Muddy Point 11/21:

How many muddy point posts are we supposed to submit for a 15/15 on courseweb?

Muddy Point 11/14:

What sites do you recommend for practice on css +html outside of the W3 sites? I want to play around with things like this in the future!

Week Eleven:

REQUIRED READING NOTES

Dewey Meets Turing: Librarians, Computer Scientists, and the Digital Libraries Initiative
by Andreas Paepcke, Hector Garcia-Molina, and Rebecca Wesley
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july05/paepcke/07paepcke.html

• The Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI) was launched in 1994 by the National Science Foundation.
• Combining the words 'digital' and 'library' defined three interested parties: librarians, computer scientists, and publishers.
• The impact reached past these three groups, as Google and its search engine emerged from funded work and changed the styles for all professions that involve computers.
• The initiative has reached the work of historians, anthropologists, political science and law professions.
• Uniting librarians and computer scientists occurred - but where does this place the publisher?
• For librarians, the Web was more difficult to integrate. 
• disruption to the library community occurred with journal publishers' charging premium for digital content.
• Digital library projects in the computer science realm relieved tension between conducting 'pure' research and impacts on day-to-day society.
• scientists had been trained to use libraries, so this provided an exciting new framework.
• Librarians that immersed themselves in the initiative understood that info technologies were important to ensuring libraries' impact on scholarly work.
• OPAC (online public access catalogs) constituted the entirety of digital facilities in libraries.
• The growth of the web changed many significant plans for the Digital Library Initiative - propelling computer scientists and libraries into new directions. 
• blurred the distinction between consumers and producers of information
• dispersed most items in the aggregate should have been collected across the world and under diverse ownership.
• Early results in the project demonstrated a nagging downside of the existing DLI research environment. 
• Environment was bound to special deals with publishers and communities were not able to share results. 
• Restrictions were serious because computer scientists traditionally make their systems functionally public.
• DLI researchers with results that were bound by per-project agreements with publishers realized they could only share a small teaser with colleagues. 
• working online removed these specific restrictions.

• The embrace of the Internet by computer scientists was natural also because of the information link that is a much employed concept in computer programming. 
• Accomplishments of the digital initiative has broadened opportunities to library science, rather than marginalized the field.
• Hubs - collections of web sites whose primary goal is to direct visitors to other web sites that specialize on the hubs topics.
• The computer was teaching and producing relevance to topics.

Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age
by Clifford A. Lynch
http://www.arl.org/storage/documents/publications/arl-br-226.pdf

• The fall of 2002 introduced the institutional repository, a new strategy that allows universities to apply serious, systematic leverage to accelerate changes taking place in scholarship and scholarly communication.
• Many technology trends came together to make the IR possible - online storage costs dropped and repositories are now more affordable.
• The development of free, publicly accessed journal article collections in discplines has demonstrated ways in which the network can change scholarly communication by altering access patterns 
• Separately, the development of a series of extraordinary digital works suggests the potential of creative authorship specifically for a digital medium to transform the presentation into scholarship.
•  Lynch defines institutional repositories in the academic setting as a set of services that a university offers to the members for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by that institution and its community members.
• Essentially it is an organizationl committment to the stewardship of digital materials, including long-term preservation where appropriate.

• At a basic and fundamental level, the IR is a recognition that the intellectual lif and scholarship of our institutions will be increasingly represented, documented, and shared in digital form - that is a primary responsibility of our universities, to exercise stewardship over these riches: to make them available and to preserve them.
• Scholarship and scholarly communication are changing and extending slowly to cultural changes at the disciplinary level.
• higher education has overlooked an opportunity to support our most innovative and creative faculty.
• Future developments in IR is covered, with suggestions that there are unexplored and interesting extensions that can be utilized in the public.
• Lynch has argued that IR is a powerful idea that serves as an engine for change in higher education.

Web Search Engines: Part 1 and 2
by David Hawking
http://web.mst.edu/~ercal/253/Papers/WebSearchEngines-1.pdf

• Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft are indexing almost a thousand times as much data for web users, providing reliable and sub second responses to around a billion queries a day in a plethora of languages.
• Part 1 covers behind the scenes look in this article, detailing the infrastructure, the algorithms, and part 2 details the algorithms and data structures required to index the 400 terabytes of a Web page text AND deliver high-quality results in response to the million queries each day.
• "crawlers" in reference to Algorithms that scale the networks and research.
• Limited space prevents discussion of the many aspects to the search engine operation. 
• high priority search engine operations monitor the search quality to ensure it does not decrease when the new index is implemented.

Current developments and future trends for the OAI protocol for metadata harvesting
by Sarah L. Shreeves, Thomas G. Habing, Kat Hagedorn, and Jeffrey A. Young
http://www.lib.umich.edu/files/services/dlps/Shreevesetal_5

• The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) has been adopted since its initial release in 2001.
• developed to federate access to diverse e-print archives through metadata and harvesting, the protocol has demonstrated its potential usefulness to a broad range of communities.
• Article details the overview of the OAI environment.
• Lit Review -  the mission is to "develop and promote interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content."
•  There are two focal points: Community- and Domain-Specific OAI Services.
• Ongoing challenges exist for the communities:
• Metadata variation -  the normalization of a subject element, with many different controlled vocabularies, are used by the different data providers. It is for most service providers, resource intensive.
• Metadata formats - many new formats including adding additional paths to the processing routines of data.
• OAI Data Provider implementation practices
• Communication Issues - loosely federated bunch, lacking general or technical skills within the group.
• The OAI community does have a future if the issues above have guidelines to deal with the problems.

Thoughts 

These articles are decent and interesting to a point, but it feels like there is a lot to know and not enough written. It is a vast topic with many points, but these readings cover the Digital Library quite well. I actually referenced the Lynch article for a paper that I wrote on Digital Humanities this semester. It's all pretty interesting to see how library science accommodates to e-science these days.

Muddy Point 11/7

In regards to Assignment 5, the 'third page' that is meant for us to describe our favorite things - did you want images or text descriptions of what we consider to be our favorites?

Week Ten:

REQUIRED READING NOTES

An Introduction to the Extensible Markup Language (XML)
by Martin Bryan
http://www.is-thought.co.uk/xmlintro.htm

• This site explains XML as a subset of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) defined in ISO standard.
• it makes it easy to interchange structured documents over the Internet.
• XML always clearly mark where the start and the end of a logical part [element] of an interchanged document occurs.
• XML defines how the Internet Uniform Resource Locators can be used to identify component parts of the XML data streams.
• This definition allows a Document Type Definition (DTD) to be defined in a formal model.
• Users can check each component of document occurrances in a valid place within the interchanged data stream.
•  Unlike SGML, XML doesn't require the presence of the DTD.
• XML allows users to bring multiple files together to form compound documents. It also:
• indentifies the location for illustrations to be incorporated into text files.
• provide processing control info for supporting programs
• add editorial comments to a file
• XML is not a predefined set of tags and is not a standardized template for production of particular types of documents.
• Basic components of XML include objects, elements, and attributes. the term XML refers to a documents composed of entities, so it differs from other markup languages in that it does not simply indicate where a change occurs.
• Systems that understand XML allow users to provide a list of elements that are valid at each point in the document. 
• elements and their attributes are entered between matched pairs of angled brackets, while entity references starts with an ampersand and end with semicolon.
•  Definition of personal tag sets and attributes of elements are described - with examples of the markup text.
• XML is capable of providing techniques for handling non-standard document elements. the coding of a scheme such as an illustration is different from the normal text contents.
• Data stored using non-XML notations need appropriate application software to process it, however the XML-coded file will correctly identify where each piece of data belongs in the completed document and where it has been stored to use previously.

Extending you Markup: a XML tutorial
by Andre Bergholz
http://xml.coverpages.org/BergholzTutorial.pdf

• This is an introduction to XML written for more general audiences rather than Bryan's article, which was geared towards an individual with a base knowledge.
• Bergholz offers a simple way of remembering DTD, XSL, RDF, and DOM when considering XML markup. 
• A well-formed XML document begins with a prolog and ends with one element.
• Stylesheets, XML Schema, and namespaces are examined and exemplified throughout the PDF.
• DTD's define the structure of xml documents - it allows users to specify the set of tags, the order of tags, and the attributes of each. ---> well formed is called valid.
• elements are either nonterminal or terminal in DTD. 
• terminal elements are declared as parsed character data or EMPTY.
• nonterminal contain sublements, grouped as sequences or choice. 
• sequence defines the order in which the subelements must appear.
• Explanation of the terms SGML and HTML to understand the influence and develpoment of XML - a semantic language that allows meaningful annotation of text.
• meaningful annotation is the essence of XML 

"XML Schema Tutorial"
http://www.w3schools.com/Schema/default.asp

• This tutorial, like the one on CSS and HTML, offers definitions, examples, quiz, and information on the XML markup in a web document.
• The introduction offers what it is, how it works, and a basic understanding refresher of HTML and DTD.
• There are examples and definitions of complex types, simple types, and data types for a user to better understand the components of XML.

Thoughts 

As I have stated previously, the W3schools tutorials do a good job of explaining each term, showing examples, and highlight key parts to each concept for people like me who have had little to none experience on the subject. Each topic has a variety of information and ways to practice, something I take into consideration when completing the assignments/labs. I have referred to these websites for information outside of these blog posts, I'm thankful they exist!

Muddy Point 10/31

For assignment 4, is there a way to copy a permalink for submission so that when you access my digital bookshelf, you do not require a log-in? Or is it okay that the URL I will have on my submission is a log-in required link?

Week Nine:

REQUIRED READING NOTES

W3 School Cascading Style Sheet Tutorial
http://www.w3schools.com/css/

• This website provided good examples on CSS and how to control the style and layout of Web pages all at once.
• CSS - defined as how to display HTML elements on a Web page.
• Stands for Cascading Style Sheets
• Styles were added to HTML 4.0 to solve problems.
• External Style Sheets save work and are stored in CSS files.
• All browsers support CSS today. --> It defines how HTML elements are meant to be displayed.
• Much like the HTML page, the quiz was a helpful tool also for remembering various components of CSS and its' defining characteristics.
• The most helpful page on this site was the CSS Examples tab

CSS Tutorial: starting with HTML + CSS
http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/011/firstcss

• This tutorial is aimed for individuals looking to start using CSS, but have not written a CSS style sheet before.
• while it does not explain the components of CSS, it does explain how to create an HTML file, a CSS file, and how to make them work together.

•  This page takes the user through a series of steps that ultimately create an HTML page with the CSS style sheet. It walks you through step by step, adding colors, fonts, navigation tools, styling links, and external CSS.
• It was fun to create my first webpage through the tutorial!

"CSS"
Chapter 2 of Cascading Style Sheets, designing for the Web by Hakon Wium Lie and Bert Bos
http://www.w3.org/Style/LieBos2e/enter/

• This chapter in this book is also an introduction to CSS as it is an HTML element that enables Web page designers to mark up a document as to its structure.
• CSS puts the designer in the driver's seat. This chapter introduces the basics of how to write CSS and HTML work together.
• Two ways to create CSS are described:
• a normal text editor and writing the style sheets "by hand"
• a dedicated tool that supports CSS writing.
• It is recommended to write the CSS by hand so that the developer of a dedicated tool does not interfere with the style you intend for a page.
• A rule is a statement about one stylistic aspect of one or more elements.
• consists of two parts: selector and declaration 
• selector is the part before the left curly brace. selector { ... } - link between HTML and the style. it specifies the elements affected by the declaration.
• declaration is the part within the curly braces { declaration } - part of the rule that sets forth what the effect will be.
• has two parts separated by a colon: property - { color: green } COLOR is the property. value - { color: green } GREEN is the value.
• The selector is based on the type of the element. 
• A style sheet is a set of one or more rules that apply to an HTML document.
• There are many definitions provided within this chapter that give a good base knowledge of the CSS and HTML elements needed.
• It becomes very technical, describing common tasks, properties, and perspectives on the information provided.

Thoughts 

I found this information very useful, especially after reviewing the terms with the W3 School tutorials. CSS and HTML are very in-depth, but this website provides a great basic coverage and examples for someone like myself to understand. I can see this information being utilized in my future as an academic librarian because I will need to create webpages for students and faculty to access. I enjoyed learning so much about these correlating topics.