Week 5 Readings

We had four readings for this week, two of which dealt with data compression while the other two addressed issues of putting library content on the web.

The website for the data compression basics was a good place to start, as there was a more informal tone to the reading. It was also apparent that the author wanted to make the information as understandable as possible - something I appreciated greatly. I was pretty much ignorant in the ways of data compression before now, as I've never had to deal with it in any great capacity before. This reading helped me to recognize the differences between lossless data compression and lossy data compression. I didn't get as much information about the lossy compression, though, because I couldn't click over to Link 2. The minute logistics of how it works is still lost to me, but I feel I now have a basic understanding of the different compression types and how they work.

I tackled the data compression wikipedia page next, and it offered me an opportunity to learn more about which data compression techniques are used in which circumstances. For example, you would want to use lossless compression when dealing with spreadsheets where information needs to stay exactly as it was. You can use lossy data compression with visual and audio files because there are certain variances in color or sound that the human eye or ear can't pick up. This enables the compression to change certain aspects of the data to better compress the file.

The next article I looked at was Youtube and libraries: It could be a beautiful relationship - by Paula L. Webb. She had a good idea in my opinion, which was to utilize the wide scope of Youtube in library services. She gave some examples of what this could be used for:
-Informing patrons of different library services
-Video of how to find the reference desk
-Teaching students how to use certain databases in the library system
She ended the article with the encouragement to think about using this service as it will help with "keeping up with the 21st century".

The final (and I must admit, favorite) article of the group was Imaging Pittsburgh: Creating a shared gateway to digital image collections of the Pittsburgh region, by Edward A. Galloway. I really enjoyed learning how this collection evolved and the challenges that were involved. I appreciated that the author freely admitted the problems they faced, and those that were unexpected. It helped me to understand the difficulty that comes from working with different institutions to put their images online. These difficulties come in the form of communication problems, selecting controlled vocabulary, and even examining the different metadata that institutions use. This was a good article that helped me to realize that there is much more to think about when it comes to digitizing records that simply what database to use and how to present the metadata.