Week 5 Readings

As much as it pains me to say it, the Wikipedia article on data compression was really helpful for understanding what the concept is all about. The basic example provided to show the difference between lossless and lossy compression was such a useful one! Sure, it's cool that you can compress 25.888888888 to 25.[9]8 and save space without losing any information, but if you just round to 26, you can save even more space... as long as you don't mind losing some of your original information.
The article on imaging Pittsburgh was amusing for its anecdotes on the difficulties inherent to any grand cross-institution project. The author writes, "Speaking as project leader, it’s difficult for me to judge whether the silence means everyone knows exactly what to do and are doing just that, or they are so busy doing other jobs that they don’t have time to communicate. Likely it is a bit of both." Dear Mr Galloway: likely, everyone involved grew silent because they stopped caring about the quality of their work once they realized that virtually no one will ever want to seriously utilize a database of old pictures of Pittsburgh.
My favorite article, though, had to be the ALA article on YouTube. It is totally, absolutely true that libraries could conceivably make little home movie how-to videos and upload them for patrons' benefit. It's just funny to think that librarians will be uploading these self-help clips to the same site that I use to watch music videos and Rick Roll my friends. In all seriousness, though, the potential for distance learning is enormous.