We talked about the Internet and the World Wide Web. Honestly, I was a little foggy on the difference because they are used pretty widely as synonyms. The metaphor that was used helped me understand it perfectly though - if the Internet is the road, then the Web is the car. The Internet is made up of more than just the Web (things such as email). We talked about domain names and URLs, etc. Our lab exercise involved us working with HTML to create webpages. I did everything alright until it got to putting the pages on the web. Somehow I messed that up and I'll have to figure it out in lab tomorrow. We also tinkered with CSS, which I need to look into further because my understanding of it is much more limited than my understanding of HTML.
Library and Information Science Foundation (INM 301)
The topic of this week's lecture was Intellectual Tools. We examined how documents and knowledge were organized from ancient times to now. In Mesopotamia, texts were indexed by their first few words, as titles were not used. Some of the most notable ancient libraries had very large collections. The Palace Library at Ebla, Syria (2600-2300 BCE), for example, had two storerooms that housed 17,000 clay tablets. That's a lot of tablets. Assurbanipal's palace library at Nineveh didn't last long: 650-612 BCE. Here they used identification tags on texts that listed the location (jar, shelf, room). Skipping some things and jumping forward a bit now...the advent of the printing press allowed more copies of texts to be made and collected. Encyclopedias began to show up in the 18th Century, around the time of the Enlightenment. The Library of Congress was founded in 1800. Pannizzi's "91 rules" served as the cataloging code for the British Museum; this was paralleled by Jewett at the Smithsonian. It was really interesting to see all the different ways of classification and the evolution of library organization over the ages.
Spanish
I was not as intimidated this time. Even though I hadn't managed to study much, I still didn't end up looking completely brainless. Yay! We were asked to write and discuss what we did that day. The professor took my work up and projected it on the overhead. Luckily, I only made a couple of mistakes. I said "en la mañana" and "en el tardes" instead of saying "por la mañana" and "por la tarde" ("in the morning" and "in the afternoon"). Not so bad. So my final product looked a bit like this: "Por la mañana, voy a la oficina de correos. Envío tres paquetes a los Estados Unidos. Envío un paquete a mi madre y dos paquetes a mis amigos. Por la tarde, estudio." We then covered the difference between the verbs ser and estoy. Our last exercise was to ask some classmates basic questions (what's your name, where are you from, what are you studying, etc).
Information Management and Policy (INM 341)
This week, we covered information overload. Does anyone else in the Library Science course (or the others) feel like they're suffering from this? I am. I feel like there's about a billion related works I could be reading, that have been on the suggested reading lists. I just don't know which ones to pick and there's no way I can manage to read them all. I will need to work on which ones I choose and how I handle the seeming overload. I found a lot of this lecture interesting. For example, Reuters did a study in 1997 called "Dying for Info" in which it was shown that 2/3 of people in this study felt that information overload caused loss of job satisfaction, 2/3 felt it damaged their personal relationships, and 1/3 felt it damaged their health. Schwartz's "paradox of choice" tells us that 10 is the highest number of possible choices we can deal with and still make a rational choice. Perhaps this is why I'm terrible at making decisions. Not my fault! Too many choices! Some possible coping tactics for information overload are: information avoidance, "if it's important they'll tell me," and satisficing (just choosing based on knowing a little but not everything; in other words, settling). I also felt the "handle only once" and "fear the 'might be useful'" tactics would help in my life, as I tend to keep things that could maybe be important later (but not really) and then wonder why I have so much junk on my desk and in my life. There are also some possibly advantageous programs mentioned in a suggested article, one of which (called Leechblock) limits the time you spend on certain websites each day.
Research Evaluation and Communication (INM 356)
This week, we looked at methods of desk research. Desk research forms a part of all research and is the only method used in some studies. Types of desk research are: literature review, meta-analysis, conceptual analysis, historical analysis, content analysis, discourse analysis, and bibliometrics. Meta-analysis gives an overall picture by examining results of several studies. Conceptual analysis aims to clarify terms and concepts. Discourse analysis focuses on how language is used. Bibliometrics examines patterns in recorded information, such as size and growth of literatures and changes in communication patterns. The others are self-explanatory, I think.
Whew! I've got some textbooks already, as I've mentioned. I have Knowledge Management: An Integrated Approach (2nd Edition) by Ashok Jashapara, as was suggested for our Info Management and Policy module. I'm on chapter 3 now. I like this one. It's easy to follow and covers a lot of the stuff we talk about in lectures. I'm about to start chapter 6 of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (3rd Edition) by Moraville and Rosenfeld. This one was suggested for DITA. It gets off to a very slow start but I think it might finally be picking up the pace a bit now. At least, I hope it gets progressively better. Week 3 starts tomorrow!!
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