Readings- 9/29/09

Data Compression-

Simple wikipedia entry about data compression. The encoding has to be understood by all parties involved and depending on how important the data is different coding systems can be used. I was very amused by the term Lossy, especially because it is so simplistic and yet explains everything so well. In a field full of complicated technical jargon, the terms Lossy and Lossless were much appreciated. In our field, I cannot imagine using Lossy compression for anything but audio and video as the entry states is what is primarily used for. The data we provide is important to everyone in its own way, so the use of Lossless compression would be of the upmost importance.

Data Compression Basics-

This article expands upon what the wikipedia entry talks about, going into detail about different types of Lossy and Lossless compression. I can honestly say that I thought I was going to be totally lost reading this article, and am very thankful for the author deciding to describe everything in simple terms. The first two encoding systems he explains, RLE and LZ77-LZW, made sense to me. The Huffman system, however, continues to baffle me. The idea that given numerical values, a decoder would figure out the right piece of data confused me. Despite re-reading the section several times, I still do not fully understand. I never got to read the Lossy part, part 2, because my computer kept saying that there was a bad server response. I shall try on other computers, but mine will not open the page. Part 3 was the video coding portion, which I was actually quite interested in. The fact that depending on what type of video you are looking at depends on what code is use, i.e. differences between animation and live action, and that all of these techniques can build upon each other is wonderful.

Imaging Pittsburgh-

This article was great at illustrating how everything we are learning in this class comes together and will help us in the long run. The fact that in was a wide variety of institutes getting together to create one huge joint photo gallery website brought a lot of things into perspective. To have that many big institutions, all with there own photo galleries organized in their own ways having to come together was wonderful, but also has so much potential for problems. The discussions over metadata and determining what scheme to use, which brought in Dublin Core and cemented that in my opinion as a brilliant universal system. Tying in with other articles from this week with issues of image quality and knowing that to get the best image there had to be a discussion about data compression. While they never directly mention it, storing that many photos means wanting to maximize space without losing data, so I assumed that they went with a lossless system.

Youtube and Libraries-

While reading this, all I could think about was how we use Panopto for recording class lectures and other pertinent information. Those recordings are always available to the students, and have proven to be very useful in going back for clarification or to find information you missed the first time around. Youtube to me has always been a place for watching silly video clips and at one point, Disney's Tarzan in 9 minute intervals. Seeing how useful the Panopto videos have been, and the fact that i have found how-to instruction videos on Youtube before make me strongly agree with Paula Webb's ideas. There are basic questions about libraries that sometimes are not asked because of embarrassment over lack of knowledge. People feel silly not knowing the basics and therefore will not ask. Using Youtube as a way to educate would ensure that instead of someone staying away from the library or being unable to find information, they would have another tool at there disposal to help. Since Youtube is pretty simple to use, they could explore on their own and would therefore get much more use out of our resources.