Semester I wrap up

To SCLS gurus, thanks. Often it is difficult to get the news from PlayAway; but non-players fade every day for lack of what is found there. (with apologies to William Carlos Williams). I'd suggest keeping the instructions as they are; for one needs to learn these technologies by doing. Wrestling with sites as they are on the web is informative; and SCLS teachers do help when queried.

The movie for this wrap-up "Information Revolution" moves too fast for my central nervous system. I became a bit sea sick, literally. Not enough time at sea, perhaps.

When discussing authority files vis-a-vis tags, it is interesting to note that authority control terms can be readily added as tags to entry; whereas the converse is not true. One can cut and past any old authority file one likes. In fact, it would be interesting to consider domains of tags. One could, for example, ask for a set of tags applied by oceanographers to a topic as opposed to say tags applied by travellers on cruise ships. These sets of tags would be represented as different tag clouds; a bit like stratified random sampling.

As to the material culture of the web, one always wonders just where is the web? It is actually held on several large storage computers somewhere. (Old missle silos in Kansas? Who knows?) As for libraries, we do need physical space for the equipment and data storage. This alone is a different physical conception than the old catalogue files; but it is physical.

A dizzying set of concepts: humbling and awesome.

Looking towards Semester II and hoping to play while dropping the nagging awareness that I am playing.