.lib

IP Addresses

Andy Revelle — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 19:07:36 +0000

I have figured out what happened related to the account signup process today in King 27. When the room was reconfigured over the winter break, the computers were networked to a single IP address. This was done because the university only has so many IP addresses to go around and they need to limit how many are in use at any one time. But the result of this was that it appeared to Twitter and WordPress as if a single machine was attempting to sign up for multiple accounts simultaneously. This caused the services to deem our requests spam and reject them.

The relationship between IP addresses and the Internet is interesting and something that we will be talking about over the course of the semester. In short, IP addresses identify devices on a network. For the most part, clients are assigned a new IP address every time they log into a network. They look something like this: 172.16.254.1. This address allows other devices on the network to talk to that device. However, when devices are behind a Network Address Translator, they are assigned local IP adresses which are hidden from external sites. So, all the machines in King 27 appeared to be a single computer to both Twitter and WordPress.

The “backbone of the Internet” is a combination of the Domain Name Servers (DNS) and IP. Each server on the internet has an IP address. So, if you want to go to Google you could enter the IP address and your browser will take you there. Try it. One IP for Google is http://74.125.224.72/ and for Facebook it’s 69.171.229.11. But that’s hard for humans to remember. For this reason, the DNS system was developed in the early 80′s to allow for human-friendly Internet addresses. So, the DNS system translates www.google.com to 74.125.224.72. The fact that don’t have to know any of this to use Facebook or Google is what has allowed the explosion in use of the Internet by non-geeks since the middle 1990′s.

IMS 201 Spring 2012

Andy Revelle — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 17:08:37 +0000

This is the first post for the Spring semester IMS201 course.

We watched the Twitter Youtube video

Printing, Scanning and Copying…

Andy Revelle — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 22:32:26 +0000

It has become increasing clear that students no longer know what a photo copy is. They know about printing and scanning, but I have been asked more and more for instruction on how to scan pages and then immediately print them. They’ll say, “how do you use the scanner.” I start to show them the book scanner, and they will interject “where do the print-outs come out.” In other words, they want to make a photo copy. But they don’t even know the word. How do technologies that people still use and need leave the public consciousness? You would think that Xerox would have made it their company goal to make sure that the verb “to xerox” remains in the American vernacular. I guess that as we move increasingly to digital texts, multiple copies are printed, not copied. However, I would argue that much like the print book, photo copies will remain in use regardless if people remember their name.

What business is our business?

Andy Revelle — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 20:46:35 +0000

Driving into work today I was listening to this week’s TWiT. Om Malik was saying that much like the railroads, newspapers failed to recognize in which business they are actually engaged. At this point, it dawned on me that academic libraries are making much the same mistake. For years, if we thought of these types of questions at all, we would have thought that we are in the collection building and archiving business. We selected materials, managed the collections comprised of those materials and provided access to those materials to our patrons. With the rise of the Internet, many began to see our role is this process as antiquated. After all, “everything is online,” isn’t it? Every year, the Ithaca survey tells us that an increasing number of faculty no longer see the library as an integral part of academic institutions because “everything is online.” While most things are in fact online these days, I don’t believe that this fact reduces the importance of academic librarians. This is because we are not in the archiving business, but rather in the authoritative information business. When a student needs scholarly information for use in a class project, Google largely fails because it does not differentiate between credible and non-credible sources. Our role in the educational process will increasingly become educating students on how to recognize credible sources in the sea of information in which they live. If this is in fact our business, we can survive the transition to the book-less library. We can thrive even in the face of the death of the commercial journal. What we have to do is to accept the change, advertise our educational mission, and to shift our collection development focus from selecting materials to highlighting good sources for credible information. We have to educate students on how to evaluate the authoritativeness of authors of online texts instead of telling them to avoid born-digital resources altogether. In other words, to evaluate the source and author instead of the medium. Contrary to the beliefs of many faculty and administrators, the millennials have little idea of how to do this but we do. And this is our business.

Watson and the future of Librarians

Andy Revelle — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 20:18:36 +0000

Reading about the level of natural language processing used in the computer used to defeat humans at Jeopardy makes me fear for the future of my profession. If users could query a source of information that has been verified using spoken language, then the majority of what I teach to students would no longer be useful. On the other hand, a single source of information, no matter how convenient, would give the creator and curator of that information incredible power. We’ll see how it all shakes out.

Online behavior, social capital and expertiese

Andy Revelle — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 15:21:44 +0000

In the interests of reintroducing myself to this blog (which no one reads unless I am teaching IMS 201), I would like to present an idea that I have been kicking around for a while. In my office I have a copy of then Penny Arcade comic “Unreal Tournament 2004 Lends Incontrovertable Proof to John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory,” which posits that “normal person + anonymity + audience = total fuckwad.” The “total fuckwad” portion of this equation is very true in the world of online gaming, especially as experienced on Xbox Live. In fact, the level of racism and homophobia that occurs in Halo matches at any given time would seem to refute any notion that significant social progress has occured in this country in the past 40 years. However, the portion of that well-know equation that I take issue with is the notion that online identities represent anonymity.

I would argue that online communities have their own version of social capital that encourages members to create and maintain an identity. What this means is that, although community members may not know the “real” identity of the people with whom they communicate with online, the online identities are every bit as real. One would not want to delete their account on a message board, for example, and have to start from zero posts again after building up a reputation that allows their opinions to be taken seriously.

Post count acts as a type of social capital in many online communities. How many times have you read something along the lines of “why should I listen to you with your 20 posts?” So violating rules of forum decency and deleting an account with 3000 posts and replacing it with another one, although possible, means not having your opinion taken seriously anymore. Also, users tend to take on an identity in these online communities. They may have a single strong opinion (GM cars are the best, defense is more important than offense in winning basketball games, JRPGs are the only type of video game worth playing, etc…) or a specific role to play (bad puns or jokes in every thread, breaking trade news, complicated analysis of defensive systems, etc…). These online identities tend to be more narrow than “real life” identities and opinions are harder to change in online communities, but this makes them no less real. And to many active members of online communities, these identities may be as important as their offline identity, so losing this social capital does not seem like any more of an option than moving to another city after committing a social transgression. So, an avatar, userID or gamertag does in my opinion not represent anonymity, but rather a separate, more focused, identity that runs parallel to other identities that one may have.

Sorry about the half-baked post, but these are ideas that have been kicking around in my head for a while that I fully intend to explore in a more systematic way in the near future.

LTSI 2010

Andy Revelle — Tue, 11 May 2010 18:53:53 +0000

I decided that I should start blogging again during LTSI 2010. I think that I have figured out how to link this blog with my Twitter account so that new posts are tweeted out to my followers. Lets see if this works.

Crowdsourcing that I can believe in…

Andy Revelle — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 18:20:07 +0000

Lower division English football club Ebbsfleet United are owned by a community of subscribers to an Internet site. The owners of the club pay 35 British Pounds a year for the right to own a part of the club. Now, before you start saying “don’t the Green Bay Packers do that too,” note the the owners of Ebbsfleet actually participate in personnel decisions. That’s right, they are crowdsourcing the role of the general manager. And, they are winning! I wonder what Andrew Keen would thing of all this.

I think that the fans of the Reds should demand this. There is little way that we as a group could do any worse, right?

Great Firefox Extention

Andy Revelle — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 14:17:47 +0000

Lifehacker reports on a Firefox Extention that allow you to select multiple links on a webpage and have them all open in seperate tabs. I think that this is really useful for opening multiple links in a RSS reader in one step. Download it here

Perhaps we should actually take note…

Andy Revelle — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 03:31:03 +0000

David Lee King has an interesting post of notes taken at a presentation by Marshall Breeding at ALA Midwinter in Denver. The idea that libraries should use the experiences and search behavior of their patrons is one that I strongly support. A generation ago, we had to start from scratch with every patron. Perhaps more importantly, they did not see the value of information. Now, we have a generation of library users that grasp the importance of information and also have a well developed set of information seeking behaviors. But, we push back arguing that our systems are more precise, often holding up the beauty of controlled vocabulary as the primary example. However, if our systems make no sense to our users (and any academic librarian who teaches a lot of BI sessions know that they do not), then we should use the systems that do make sense to them as models. I really like Breeding’s point about Amazon; why is it that our facets are incomprehensible to users while Amazon’s require no training? I think this has to do with the nature of faceted library catalogs. They pull the facets from the MARC record. To the majority of library users, the information from the MARC record is of little use.

But there is another thing about the library catalog that has been bothering my lately. When I search for books by an unfamilar author, all I get is a list of records without context. What I mean is that I have no way of knowing if it is considered an authoritative source. Also, I don’t know if it is considered A major wor by that author. To get this information, I have to go to Amazon. So me, a librarian who believes in the power of our systems, is forced to go to a commercial website for necessary information. We really need to rectify this situation or risk being faced with obsolescence.