Week 5 Reading Notes

Data Compression Wikipedia The basics I got from this article are that I have used both kinds of data compression. When I compressed Excel files to share with lab partners, I probably was using lossless, while when I compressed Photoshop files of digital images to send them to friends and family, I used lossy compression. Both seem to have their uses, though you would want to be careful that you didn't use the wrong sort in the wrong situation. There are instances when rounding numbers up in a saved Excel file can completely mess up your results when completely statistical tests. Data Compression Basics The examples on this page were very helpful. I would not have understood these concepts without the step by step dialogue. Granted I'm still a little fuzzy on some of the concepts, like when the author talks about families of algorithms, but that's just my general reaction to math terminology. It was interesting to learn that jpegs are already pretty compressed as is. However, I know I had to post Photoshop assignments to Blogger and are teacher had us optimize them for the web and that made them lower quality and thus smaller files. There is more than one way to save space, it's just that compressing seems to make keeping higher quality images feasible. Entropy coding is definitely still fuzzy. I'll just stick with the idea that it shortens or lengthens codes depending on the needs of the computer. "Imaging Pittsburgh" This article was very useful for better understanding the challenges of using grant money between different institutions. Lay people usually assume that libraries, museums, and archives are directly connected, but even in cases where they are different departments of the same unit, the separation can cause difficulties in communication. I didn't realize that Microsoft Access had such broad applications. For personal use it can be nice, but I'm surprised it worked for the archives and historical society. YouTube and Libraries What a neat idea! I think every academic library should take her advice and post YouTube videos helping freshman naviagate both the physical and digital libraries. I was lucky to have a required LIS 101 class my freshman year, but many universities don't offer those, and I never did successfuly figure out the architecture of the Rasmuson Library at UAF. Some of floors could only be reached by one set of stairs while another set of stairs was on the opposite side of the building. Also I never did figure out where to find the Reference librarians. You'd think they'd be at the desk with a big sign on it that said "Reference," but this wasn't the case at all. I don't see any downsides to using YouTube really. It's free, public, and not too time consuming.