Reading Notes for Week Five

"Data Compression" from Wikipedia
While the "theory" section of this article went a bit over my head, I followed the concept of data compression and the two different types pretty clearly. Essentially, data compression is exactly what it sounds like- making data into smaller pieces so that more of it can fit onto the hard disk, conserving space. As the article mentions, there's the downside of extra effort required to decompress the file, but compression seems like a good idea, especially when it comes to library computers, which need to have access to a lot of different files. Lossless compression seems far more preferable, but it seems like there are ways to make lossy compression acceptable. Subtle changing of JPEG pixels could be good for mass online distribution and storage of photos, but it certainly can't be accepted as archival quality.

Data Compression Basics
A more in-depth and practical demonstration of the things talked about in the aforementioned Wikipedia article. The author describes how data compression works, and was nice enough to do it in a step-by-step, mostly uncomplicated sort of way. There were two concepts that particularly jumped out to me. First was the run-length encoding approach to lossless data compression, which works best for high-contrast images (I imagine black-and-white schematics and such would be the best candidate for RLE compression). Secondly, I thought the article really described the video compressing process well, particularly when showing how breaking two scenes into grids and comparing the similar spots make for easy targets of compressable information. This is one of those things I would like to try out, but I'm not quite sure if I actually know how to- at least I've got the theory down!

"Imaging Pittsburgh"
Fun fact- Ed Galloway is my boss at the Archives Service Center. Moving on... This article runs through the process and challenges of creating an online database of images collected from three different institutions. I was most intrigued by the different metadata challenges; it becomes really apparent that some sort of standard is needed, like the Dublin Core model Galloway describes that we read about last week. I also like the idea of organizing the collections by themes, which is a definite advantage to having the pictures online. They can occupy more than one space or "album," making image searching more multifunctional and less constricted.

"Youtube and Libraries"
This is definitely an interesting idea. The library at my undergraduate university had something like this, a virtual tour where some students walked around the library explaining what was on each floor, what our special resources were, etc. It was really useful (at least, for those who viewed it- I'd be interested to see the number of hits), especially in detailing some policies and letting users know things like, "Hey, there's something more than vending machines on the fifth floor!" and, "Oh, we have microfilm?" I like the idea of this as a kind of educational outreach- there's a lot of times where new students can't remember things they heard in a lecture, and find it easier to be told than to look something up to read. I definitely think that the whole trend of reaching into popular media outlets is an innovative and appealing way to get involved in an increasingly digitized campus culture.