As libraries' physical collections disappear into online collects, and their other services become increasingly more technological, the demand for good information architecture on library websites is growing very rapidly. Information architects developing library websites should consider users who know the exact pieces of information they're looking for; users who do not know exactly the information they're looking for and want to browse the available subject areas; and users who want everything on a subject. I am interested in academic libraries, particularly in the humanities, in which the later two types of user behavior are the most common.
Academic library websites must have a somewhat ambiguous interface to attend to the needs of users browsing for general information in a particular subject area. At the same time, it is absolutely essential that the library websites enable them to get to a specific piece of information quickly, for example, the record for an item, or the opening hours for the building. The necessary technologies for library websites include databases through which the catalog can be accessed and holdings which might be displayed using an XML language, like the Dublin Core, MARC, or the World Wide Web Consortium. As an academic library's users are for the most part faculty and students, it would need to have an accessible interface, not written into the HTML, but instead included in the form a cascading style sheet. The library at St. Olaf College, where I did my first degree is a good example of an architecturally sound academic library website. Just from the homepage, it allows the user to browse using links, subject searches, and key word searches, as well as search for specific items using title, author, or ISBN searches.
Applications Development
Using the John Milton page as a starting point, I figured out the basics of JavaScript, in which I learned how to use a confirm box, which would say whatever I wanted it to say after the user had prompted it by clicking on the first box, which I could also manipulate. The main challenge when I got to the "News or Sports" application was how to get a box that would allow the user to select from a number of different choices while still using text. The solution that I came up with turned out to be sort of a compromise between having the user use only numbers and only text. The prompt box worked best for this as opposed to an alert box or a confirm box, because in an alert box only allows the user to click "Ok" or "Cancel." After establishing the prompt boxes, it was necessary to create a case sensitive statement that would direct the user to the appropriate page. This is where parseInt came in. According to David Flanagan in JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, “[parseInt] convert[s] and return[s] any number at the beginning of a string, ignoring any trailing non-numbers. parseint parses only integers…” (165). After creating a route to each page, I used document.write to establish the links to each of the corresponding BBC pages.
To view my JavaScript pages click here.
To view my JavaScript pages click here.
Information Retrieval
As the exercise asked, I used the Bing search engine to conduct a search using Boolean logic. As I am planning a meal for this Saturday, celebrating the American holiday of thanksgiving, but am not quite sure which recopies I will be preparing, I would probably be classified as an anomalous state of knowledge (ASK) user. There is no specific piece of information that I know that I want to retrieve.
I first keyed in the terms “vegetarian AND thanksgiving.” Bing turned up 4,780,000 results for this request. When I searched “vegetarian OR thanksgiving,” Bing found 28,300,000 results. After searching “vegetarian NOT thanksgiving” 20,400,000 results turned up, and “thanksgiving NOT vegetarian” turned up 22,300,000 results. Using this search tool, AND narrowed the search while OR broadened it. NOT isolated the search so that it only turned up documents containing one term but not the other.
In order to see how Bing filters keywords (whether it includes stop words or not) I typed in the question “Where can I find thanksgiving recipes that are vegetarian friendly?” Bing turned up 522,000 results, the first five of which were relevant to my query. The seventh result, however, paid attention to the term “friendly” and gave me information on “diabetic-friendly thanksgiving recipes.”
Doing a manual search using “thanksgiving+recipes+vegetarian,” Bing came up with 24,800,000 results, four out of the first ten were relevant to my query. The other six simply contained “thanksgiving,” “recipes,” and “vegetarian” somewhere in their documents.
In addition to the perspective of a user on an information retrieval system, there are also the perspectives of the source and the system itself. The most efficient index structure is the inverted file, which I arranged for two documents. An image of my arrangement of the documents “museum and Durer Rembrandt Turner of Constable gallery” and “ancient which gallery Egyptian artifacts Assyrian museum” is shown below. Click on the image below to view a larger display of it.
I first keyed in the terms “vegetarian AND thanksgiving.” Bing turned up 4,780,000 results for this request. When I searched “vegetarian OR thanksgiving,” Bing found 28,300,000 results. After searching “vegetarian NOT thanksgiving” 20,400,000 results turned up, and “thanksgiving NOT vegetarian” turned up 22,300,000 results. Using this search tool, AND narrowed the search while OR broadened it. NOT isolated the search so that it only turned up documents containing one term but not the other.
In order to see how Bing filters keywords (whether it includes stop words or not) I typed in the question “Where can I find thanksgiving recipes that are vegetarian friendly?” Bing turned up 522,000 results, the first five of which were relevant to my query. The seventh result, however, paid attention to the term “friendly” and gave me information on “diabetic-friendly thanksgiving recipes.”
Doing a manual search using “thanksgiving+recipes+vegetarian,” Bing came up with 24,800,000 results, four out of the first ten were relevant to my query. The other six simply contained “thanksgiving,” “recipes,” and “vegetarian” somewhere in their documents.
In addition to the perspective of a user on an information retrieval system, there are also the perspectives of the source and the system itself. The most efficient index structure is the inverted file, which I arranged for two documents. An image of my arrangement of the documents “museum and Durer Rembrandt Turner of Constable gallery” and “ancient which gallery Egyptian artifacts Assyrian museum” is shown below. Click on the image below to view a larger display of it.
Databases
Relational databases were first designed as a way to represent data without redundancies so that they could be updated centrally and accessed throughout a system with only the relevant information visible to users. A Database Table consists of rows and columns with each row representing a particular thing, and each column representing a particular property of those things. For example, a database on a music collection might contain a database table containing data on all of the compact discs with columns labeled “Album Title,” “Artist,” “Year,” and “Record Label” and rows that represent each CD; a database table containing data on all of the vinyl records with the same row labels; and a database table containing data on all of the tapes with these same row labels. To access a particular set of data, a user could search one or more fields in a table. For instance, “select album_title, year from tapes where album_title = purple_rain;” would pull up the only the year and album title from any tapes whose album title was listed as Purple Rain. Just as it is possible to search many fields at the same time, it is also possible to search many tables at a time by. For instance, in the music example, it would be possible to pull up all of the records (not vinyl) in the collection regardless of the form by: “select * from tapes, CDs, vinyl records; “. This search would bring up all of the records.
Markup and Cascading Style Sheets
The World Wide Web Consortium originally created Cascading Style Sheets so that it would be possible to write web pages without weighing down the html with a lot of extra code creating with styling commands. Because Cascading Style Sheets allow designers to make generalized changes through the use of commands specific to them as well as classes, and they do not impose storage constraints, they allow webpage designers a lot more freedom in their work.
Some of the problems with Cascading Style Sheets to do with the fact that they are written in ASCII are that a) the writer must know English in order to utilize them, and b) the writer must be very exact, and cannot make any mistakes in the code, or else it will not turn out the way s/he intends it to look. Therefore, Cascading Style Sheets require a certain amount of prior knowledge to create. They are not accessible to the wider public. Fortunately, this problem has been realized by software developers, and templates, like the one I have used for this blog, have been created for those who are not as familiar with HTML, resulting in the surge of internet usage around the world.
I created a few of my own cascading style sheets that I have applied to my webpages by creating an internal style sheet, which I linked to the html documents that I had already written. I chose an internal style sheet over external and inline style sheets because I wanted to create a unique style sheet for each page, and I wanted to separate the style of the words from the content of my html.
Some of the problems with Cascading Style Sheets to do with the fact that they are written in ASCII are that a) the writer must know English in order to utilize them, and b) the writer must be very exact, and cannot make any mistakes in the code, or else it will not turn out the way s/he intends it to look. Therefore, Cascading Style Sheets require a certain amount of prior knowledge to create. They are not accessible to the wider public. Fortunately, this problem has been realized by software developers, and templates, like the one I have used for this blog, have been created for those who are not as familiar with HTML, resulting in the surge of internet usage around the world.
I created a few of my own cascading style sheets that I have applied to my webpages by creating an internal style sheet, which I linked to the html documents that I had already written. I chose an internal style sheet over external and inline style sheets because I wanted to create a unique style sheet for each page, and I wanted to separate the style of the words from the content of my html.
XML and MARC
In the field of information and library science (LIS), one of the major challenges of the last twenty or so years of the twentieth century was converting the data about items held in a library from index cards--on which librarians had simply typed the metadata (author, title, publisher etc...)--to computers. A few different solutions have been developed for this problem have been developed, including the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI), the Web Ontology Language (OWL), and MAchine Readable Cataloging (MARC).
The main way that MARC works is that it assigns all fields, such as author, title etc... as an element, assigns tags and indicators as attributes, and it treats subfields as subelements. For example, an item might be assigned a datafield with a number, while each piece of metadata about the item has been assigned an element, such as a, b, c, etc... When representing an item, for example The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, the system would assign the book an arbitrary number and have a preassigned definition of title, author, date, publisher, and ISBN as the elements. The record might look like this:
< datafield tag="670" ind1=" " ind2=" ">
< subfield code="a" > The Grapes of Wrath, c1939: < / subfield >
< subfield code="b" > (John Steinbeck) < / subfield >
MARC is especially beneficial because as an XML file it can share data with other DTDs, such as the DCMI. MARC's official website explains in further detail of the various ways to utilize the DTD, as well as examples of how it marks up various references.
The main way that MARC works is that it assigns all fields, such as author, title etc... as an element, assigns tags and indicators as attributes, and it treats subfields as subelements. For example, an item might be assigned a datafield with a number, while each piece of metadata about the item has been assigned an element, such as a, b, c, etc... When representing an item, for example The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, the system would assign the book an arbitrary number and have a preassigned definition of title, author, date, publisher, and ISBN as the elements. The record might look like this:
< datafield tag="670" ind1=" " ind2=" ">
< subfield code="a" > The Grapes of Wrath, c1939: < / subfield >
< subfield code="b" > (John Steinbeck) < / subfield >
MARC is especially beneficial because as an XML file it can share data with other DTDs, such as the DCMI. MARC's official website explains in further detail of the various ways to utilize the DTD, as well as examples of how it marks up various references.
Introduction to Graphics
Because the exercize asked that I save files as. jpg and .gif, I did not practice with .png as much. The lecture notes state that while Portable Network Graphics (pgn) are "a very useful alternative" to the Graphic Interchange Format (gif) and Joint Photographic Experts Group (jpg) formats, PNG has not yet become very popular on the WWW (City University 2009). In my experience looking at the image sources on web pages, this assertion certainly seemed to be the case. I first wanted to attach an image that my friend Emily had displayed on the web, but she had displayed the image on Livejournal as part of a slide show, and I could not separate one of the images from the others. When I tried to find the link to the image by viewing the website as an HTML document, rather than an application on Flash, I noticed that she had uploaded the images from her computer using gif. I gave up trying to use her images, and instead used an image from Flickr that was posted by the USA Today. The image that I ended up using has been saved under jpg format.
When you look at the two images on my website, one is a lot grainier than the other. The difference is not due to the formats they have been saved in; they are both .jpg files. The difference is because the first one—the grainy one—is a snapshot that I took, and the second one is a professional photograph put out by USA Today. Here's a link to my website
The Internet and the WWW
This week we focused on writing our own websites using HTML. I got some practice first using a website--www.w3schools.com--that allowed me to type into a box the HTML code, and then to view what I had written.
I am not nearly as familiar with Unix as I am with Windows or Mac OS, but the whole process of changing the directory and putting the files that I had created into the public domain made a lot more sense than changing the directory did the first time.
After I moved my html files to the public folder, I made some changes to the files. I thought because I had moved my files to a new folder, the changes that I made would take effect in those folders, as well. However, I cannot see those changes when I view the webpage on my personal computer. I think that this might be true because I saved them to the U drive on the university computers. In order to make changes to the public, you need to save them to the public drive, instead of just to the home drive.
I'm sure it's possible to save these files to the public folder without using Unix, and I'm sure that we're using Unix for this type of transfer so that we can learn how to use the program. I wonder how one would create a website on just windows or just OS.
Click here to view the webpage that I created.
I am not nearly as familiar with Unix as I am with Windows or Mac OS, but the whole process of changing the directory and putting the files that I had created into the public domain made a lot more sense than changing the directory did the first time.
After I moved my html files to the public folder, I made some changes to the files. I thought because I had moved my files to a new folder, the changes that I made would take effect in those folders, as well. However, I cannot see those changes when I view the webpage on my personal computer. I think that this might be true because I saved them to the U drive on the university computers. In order to make changes to the public, you need to save them to the public drive, instead of just to the home drive.
I'm sure it's possible to save these files to the public folder without using Unix, and I'm sure that we're using Unix for this type of transfer so that we can learn how to use the program. I wonder how one would create a website on just windows or just OS.
Click here to view the webpage that I created.
Bits, Bytes, and Binary
Today, after the lecture discussing the way that binary translates into a code that is more accessible to humans—text in the form of ASCII, to be more specific—we explored the ways that ASCII works, the ways that it is different from other codes used in word processors which are more complex, and the ways that it translates to them.
While ASCII works well among different formats, other data formats represent different styles and fonts more efficiently than ASCII can. Also ASCII does not represent non-Roman characters, making it necessary for other data formats to exist in order to make computing in other languages possible. However, it makes sense that as developers of Unicode and other formats, they made this decision to keep one kind of simple code that many other applications could read.
ASCII is extremely useful for translating basic text, the way we did today and Notepad, MS Word, and a browser in HTML because it can be manipulated with tags to perform certain tasks but still keep the basic information of a document. Unicode is capable of creating something like 107,000 characters versus ASCII’s puny 128 and has an unlimited number of bytes, has become the standard code. MS Word does not use ASCII because it is capable of creating many more characters than 128, but Word is able to read text files.
Blogs
There are three different kinds of blogs: the hosted service, software package, and the desktop client. Blogger, the service that I am using, is a hosted service because it is run by an external organization, instead of by a server or a client.
Blogs enable individuals to not only learn about things, but also to participate in them--to ask questions, and discuss with other readers via comments or related blogs. For instance, some news blogs utilize their readers as fact checkers for the news postings in the blog. The final result is a collaboration that defies the one-way communication model of journalist/reader, utilized in newspapers and magazines. They also enable individuals to share information with others using many different forms of media. In addition to text, a "blogger" can include photos as well as imbed videos and audio recordings.
Blogs enable individuals to not only learn about things, but also to participate in them--to ask questions, and discuss with other readers via comments or related blogs. For instance, some news blogs utilize their readers as fact checkers for the news postings in the blog. The final result is a collaboration that defies the one-way communication model of journalist/reader, utilized in newspapers and magazines. They also enable individuals to share information with others using many different forms of media. In addition to text, a "blogger" can include photos as well as imbed videos and audio recordings.
A blog becomes only what the author wants it to become. Blog sites, like blogger, the one I am currently using, enable users to control what readers see and what readers can do. Blogger gives me that control. This is just one example of the control that blogger gives me. I have also decided to change some of the settings to better represent myself. Because I am an American, I have set the language to (United States) English. I have also changed the date format to display the month before the day. Blogs are generally organized showing the latest post at the top of the previous posts, with a link to archive of all of the posts somewhere on the webpage. This setup allows regular readers of a blog to stay up to date with the blog without having to sift through a lot of old entries.
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