Dates

Topics

January 5-8

Introduction: Course Overview; Goals and Objectives; Review of Course Policies, Assignments, etc.; Why the Course Focuses on Open Source Applications

January 9-15

Using Linux/UNIX

January 16-22, 23-29

Basic Aspects and Features of HTML/XHTML

January 30-February 5, February 6-12

Cascading Style Sheets

February 13-19, 20-26

XML

February 27-March 4

Relational Database Management Systems: Principles and Applications

March 5-12

Spring Vacation

March 13-19

Collection Workflow Integration Systems

March 20-26

Integrated Online Library Systems

March 27-April 2

Content Management Systems; Information Portals; Customizable Library Portals; Groupware

April 3-9, 10-16

Digital Archiving Systems

Course Goals

According to the W3C Recommendation of December 15, 2004 entitled “Architecture of the World Wide Web, Part One”:

The World Wide Web uses relatively simple technologies with sufficient scalability, efficiency and utility that they have resulted in a remarkable information space of interrelated resources, growing across languages, cultures, and media.

The specific aim of this course is to assay some of the core technologies of the World Wide Web and achieve an understanding of the role these technologies will play in the development of the so-called “Semantic Web. More specifically, the goal of LIBSCI 2663 Technologies for Information Management is to familiarize students with an array of technologies that form the basis for digital libraries, In some instances, students will work directly with the technologies; in other instances, students will evaluate the suitability of technologies to specific tasks. During the course of the term, there will also be experiments with new technologies and applications involving both students and instructor.

Prerequisites

Formally, there are no prerequisites, but the course assumes a basic knowledge of desktop, network-based, and end-user computing.

Conduct of the Course

The conduct of the course is based on the notion of mastery learning. This means that the focus of teaching and learning is on establishing a detailed and useful understanding of key concepts and issues, through the readings, discussions, assignments, and online sessions.

Assignments

Grades will be determined on the basis of the principal assignments, which represent cumulatively 65 percent of the final grade, and the quasi-weekly discussion topics, which account for the remaining 35 percent of the final grade. The assignments should be submitted in the manner and form specified in the statement of the assignment.

N.b., Where an assignment requires students to have access to a specific resource, access to the resource will be provided in a timely manner

The assignments, including the dates on which each assignment is due, are listed in the ASSIGNMENTS folder, as well as below.

Grading

The table to the right illustrates how quality points correlate to letter grades. Students who fail to earn a B or better will be obligated to retake the course.

G-Grades: For this course, a G-Grade will be granted by permission of the instructor only. The G-Grade allows two additional terms to complete course work.

Letter Grade

Points Required

A+

98-100

A

93-97

A-

90-92

B+

87-89

B

83-86

Academic Integrity

Academic Integrity: Students in this course will be expected to comply with University of Pittsburgh's Policy on Academic Integrity. Any student suspected of violating this obligation for any reason during the semester will be required to participate in the procedural process, initiated at the instructor level, as outlined in the University Guidelines on Academic Integrity.

Special Student Services

Disabilities: If you have a disability that requires special testing accommodations or other classroom modifications, you need to notify both the instructor and the Disability Resources and Services no later than the 2nd week of the term. You may be asked to provide documentation of your disability to determine the appropriateness of accommodations. To notify Disability Resources and Services, call 648-7890 (Voice or TTD) to schedule an appointment. The Office is located in 216 William Pitt Union.

Class Meetings

There will be an online meeting at least once a week. Because we have students living in different time zones and dealing with a variety of scheduling issues, and because short meetings are much better than long ones, the likelihood that there will be more than one session a week is a distinct possibility. The day and time of the meeting or meetings will be established during the first week of the term via the DISCUSSION BOARD.

Student attendance at the weekly online meetings is not obligatory, but it is highly encouraged.

VOIP in the specific form of Skype will be used as the basis for one-one and small group consultations throughout the course of the term. Students who wish to take advantage of this capability should download and install the Skype client on their respective computers and register with the Skype service.

Configuring Your System and Accessing Your Account

LIS 2663 Technologies for Information Management entails access to two designated servers. The first of these servers is unixs.cis.pitt.edu, and it will serve as the host of the accounts that you use during the first half of the course to pursue various assignments.

The second server, orbison.exp.sis.pitt.edu, will serve as the host of applications used for assignments due later in the term. Because access to orbison.exp.sis.pitt.edu is restricted to SSH (secure shell) clients, you must follow the instructions presented below. Passwords for the personal accounts on orbison.exp.sis.pitt.edu will be distributed through the Digital Dropbox on CourseWeb. Unless specified otherwise, the user IDs and passwords that provide access to orbison.exp.sis.pitt.edu will also provide individual access to the Collection Workflow Integration System, the Internet Scout Portal, the Koha Library System, and the OpenBiblio Library System, each of which will be mounted at the aforementioned address.

Download and install an SSH (secure shell client). SSH Workstation 3.2.9 is recommended for PCs; although OS X includes native support for the secure shell, JellyfiSSH 4.2 – see SSH Clients folder under the SOFTWARE tab on CourseWeb -- is recommended as GUI-based SSH client for OS X. If you are using one of the mainstream Linux distributions, such as Debian, Fedora, or RedHat, support for SSH is also native.

It is also recommended that you download an FTP client application, if you do not already have one installed on your computer. For Windows users, a copy of FileZilla is available for download in the FTP Clients folder under the SOFTWARE tab; for OS X users, the best client available free-of-charge is Fugu, which may be obtained from the Research Systems UNIX Group at the University of Michigan or via the FTP Clients folder under the SOFTWARE tab.

Coding for HTML. XHTML. XML, and CSS can be produced with a text editor, such as Microsoft’s Notepad or the University of Washington’s pico. However, other, better tools are available free-of-charge, including Nvu. Nvu (pronounced N-view, for a "new view") “is a complete Web Authoring System that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web page editing.  Nvu is designed to be extremely easy to use, making it ideal for non-technical computer users who want to create an attractive, professional-looking web site without needing to know HTML or web coding.” If you have access to a recent version of Macromedia’s Dreamweaver or Adobe’s GoLive, you should use it for composing and editing your code; otherwise, you should download, install, and use Nvu. (Please do not use Microsoft’s FrontPage or Word to produce your code; each of these applications introduces proprietary codes that may be expected to diminish the functionality and portability of the documents that you create or mark up.)

Core Readings

Except for Using Open Source Systems for Digital Libraries, the books are available via the ULS Digital Library and Safari Tech Books Online.

Meyer, Eric A. Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition. O'Reilly Media, 2004. ISBN: 0596005253

Musciano, Chuck, and Bill Kennedy. HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, 5th Edition. O'Reilly Media, 2002. ISBN: 059600382

Ray, Erik T. Learning XML, 2nd Edition. O'Reilly Media, 2003. ISBN: 0-596-00420-6

Rhyno, Art. Using Open Source Systems for Digital Libraries. Libraries Unlimited. 2003. ISBN: 159158065

Homework Assignments

The assignments for LIS 2663 Technologies for Information Management are listed below, each of them due on the dates specified. N.b., Where an assignment requires students to have access to a specific resource, access to the resource will be provided in a timely manner.

Due Date

Principal Assignments

Points

January 15

Create a personal Website at unixs.cis.pitt.edu and and post as the index.html an essay that addresses the principal differences among HTML, XHTML, and XML in a report of 300-500 words and is presented as an XHTML-compliant document.

5

January 22

Apply XHTML markup to the "Concord River" segment of Henry David Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans by Arthur Conan Doyle, and then post the results as HTML files to the Web directory on your account at unixs.cis.pitt.edu

5

January 29

Format the "Concord River" segment of Henry David Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans by Arthur Conan Doyle by creating an embedded style sheet for each text. Post the results as HTML files to the Web directory on your account at unixs.cis.pitt.edu.

5

February 13

Create and apply linked style sheets to the "Concord River" segment of Henry David Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans by Arthur Conan Doyle. The style sheets should create, in effect, the appearance of an early version of each work. Presentation of your work should include notes about the versions being emulated and how the style sheets were designed to create such effects. Post the results as HTML files to the Web directory on your account at unixs.cis.pitt.edu.

5

February 27

Create an annotated version of either the Conan Doyle or Thoreau text, with at least 20 annotations hyperlinked to the selected text. Post the results as HTML files to the Web directory on your account at unixs.cis.pitt.edu.

10

March 20

Devise a content-based markup scheme for the "Concord River" segment of Henry David Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, explain the basis for the composition of the scheme,  implement the scheme as an XML document, and link the XML document to an appropriately designed stylesheet.

10

March 27

Using Koha or OpenBiblio, build a MARC representation for a subject collection of 25 items.

5

April 10

Using the Internet Scout Project's Collection Workflow Integration System, create a collection of 25 related documents and metadata sufficient to describe the content of each document and the collection as a whole.

5

April 17

Assess and revise a segment of the SIS IT Portal or design and create a module for the SIS Collaboratory.

15

Date

Quasi-Weekly Discussions

Points

January 9-15

Introductions; Orientation

-

January 16-22

Why are open source software and open standards of particular importance to libraries and archives? Discuss this question in view of William Moen’s No Longer Under Our Control:  The Nature and Role of Standards in the 21st Century Library, a Luminary Lecture presented at The Library of Congress in December, 2003.

5

January 30-February 5

According to Chudnov, et al. :

It has never been easier to integrate access to rich information resources. Applications for metasearch, reference linking, virtual catalogs, portals, courseware, digital collections, metadata harvesting, and managing "personal libraries" have all made major advances in enabling integration. Despite these advancements, however, users still suffer under a diversity of discontinuous interfaces and techniques for moving information around between all of these services.

Within this context, how are services such as CiteULike and FURL likely to affect the rapid discovery and movement of information across the Web? What are the major limitations of CiteULike, FURL, and other related services?

5

February 6-12

Brewster Kahle is the Director and Co-founder of the Internet Archive. Please discuss his talk, entitled “Universal Access to Knowledge," which was presented on December 13, 2004, as part of The Library of Congress’s “Digital Future” series.

5

February 20-26

In C-SPAN’s “Digital Futures” series, David M. Levy, professor at the Information School of the University of Washington and the author of "Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age," discussed the shift of the experience of reading from the fixed page to movable electrons and the effect that has had on language. Edward L. Ayers, the author (with Anne S. Rubin) of "The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War," addressed the implications for the creation and distribution of knowledge in today's digital environment. What do these two presentations suggest about the potential of digital documents, and about the development of standards for the creation of digital documents?

5

March 5-12

Spring Break

March 13-19

“Between content repositories and educational technologies lies the scholar's workspace wherein he or she needs to be able to gather content with as much relevant metadata as possible, use and adapt it as necessary (and supportable), interoperate with other tools and environments, and publish it to the desired audiences.” From Digital Library Content and Course Management Systems: Issues of Interoperation: Appendix 4.0: Use Case Working Group: Report and Recommendations. (July, 2004) What are the functional requirements of the scholar’s workspace? How well are those requirements currently supported by the systems to which you have access?

5

March 27-April 2

Why is RSS thought to be an important development, and how may it be adapted to library services? (See the “Digital Future” presentation on blogging, the nature of distributed authority, and the end of metadata by David Weinberger, a Research Fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.)

5

April 3-10

Stewardship in the Digital Age: Roles and Issues for Libraries for Preserving Our Cultural Heritage, a 2003 Library of Congress Luminaries Lecture by Meg Bellinger of Yale University Libraries, and Institutional Repositories: Is There Anything Left to Say? a 2004 presentation by Paul Conway of Duke University as part of the OCLC Distinguished Seminar series, offer two perspectives on digital libraries and repositories. What do the two presentations suggest about the prospects for and the challenges of the transition to increasingly digital library and archival collections? (The sound quality of the recording of Conway’s presentation is badly flawed, and you may find it difficult to listen for extended periods. However, the recording has been included because Conway has relevant things to say.)

5

Date

Reading Assignment(s)

Week of January 9-15

Access in the Future Tense; Learning Debian GNU/Linux, Chapters 1, 3-6.

Week of January 16-22

Emerging Visions for Access in the Twenty-first Century Library; Learning Debian GNU/Linux, Chapters 7-9.

Week of January 23-29

HTML & XHTML, Chapters 3-11

January 30-February 5

Cascading Style Sheets, Chapters 1-5; Using Open Source Systems for Digital Libraries, Chapters 1-3

February 6-12

Cascading Style Sheets, Chapters 6-11; HTML & XHTML, Chapters 16-17; Learning XML, Chapters 1-2.

February 13-19

Learning XML, Chapters 3, 5-6;

February 20-26

Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, Chapters 1-5, 8-9; Using Open Source Systems for Digital Libraries, Chapters 4-6.

February 27-March 4

Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, Chapters 11-12, 14-15; Using Open Source Systems for Digital Libraries, Chapters 7-9.

March 13-19

Using Open Source Systems for Digital Libraries, Chapter 10.

March 20-26

How to Evaluate a Content Management System; Trusted Digital Repositories

March 27-April 2

The Current State of Portal Applications in ARL Libraries

April 3-9

DSpace: An Open Source Dynamic Digital Repository; The Fedora Project: an Open-Source Digital Object Repository Management System; The Digital Preservation of e-Prints; Open Archives and UK Initiatives, from D-Lib Magazine