Reading Notes for Week 5

Data Compression:

Data compression is a very useful and necessary way to deal with data and limited the amount of hard drive space that it taken up any given file. Data compression is needed because with modern networks tremendous amount of information from computer to computer all the time. Since there is only finite bandwidth that any particular computer use at any one time and computer users want to download huge files like videos these files have to be compressed to travel across the computer networks in a relatively short amount of time. There are two types of data compression that are available to computers to compress their data, loseless and lossy compression. Loseless compression is the a particular type of compression that are in Blu-Ray discs as they are advertised it is useally viewed as the best but some files cannot be compressed with this format. Lossy compression on the other hand it more common, always works however accept that a certain amount of data will be lost.

One of the most common type of data that is compressed is videos were the data is constructed in a way that the compression needs of a particular computer is determine by a program and a video data stream is compress based upon the abilities of the computer. Usually when it comes to videos on the web there are different options for different compression streams. A example would be there would be a video stream for computer that have cable connection and there might be a option for computers that have a slower connection. By choosing the practical streams the site will send you a particular resolution size of the video that will be able to be played. After reading the first two articles on data compression it is nice to learn about the specific types of data compress. When I normarlly would here about data compression I would have no idea how this occurred. Now I have some understand of what comes along with data compression. Most the information in the second article was extremely confusion to me who does not have a deep understanding of computer. However it was nice, particularly with the Wikipedia article, learning about the types of data compression.

First Monday:

After reading the article about Imaging Pittsburgh it is important to see just how effort it takes to take on the types of projects like Imaging Pittsburgh. The goal was to store these photographs in a way that it would be accessible by the web for people who were interest in photographs of the past. Coming along with massive projects that involve many types of intuitions it becomes difficult for the institutions to work on the same page. Since this project involves a tremendous amount of photographs it becomes necessary to decide what photographs will be the ones digitized. Even with modern data compression, photos can be compressed only so much and there is only so much data that can be stored. When the photographs are chosen that will be digitized there has to be work on the meta data that will describe what is stored in these photographs for the computer and the end user. It is nice to see a practical example of a project that combines digitization, the application of meta data, and data compression.

YouTube:

I am not a big Youtube user I get my video online video from other sources. It is interesting to see just how YouTube can be used in the library setting. YouTube does offer, along with other video sites to reach a tremendous amount of people with very little effort. With the advent of modern web cams and portable camcorders it is relatively cheap and easy to create and share videos with friends and strangers with sites like YouTube. It is also useful to see that some libraries and librarians are using current technologies to better serve their patrons.