Tags
City University London, housekeeping, Library education, Library qualifications, Library school, metapost
To complement my previous post on studying the MSc in Library Science at City University London, this entry consists of a listing of posts I made that were relevant to the taught part of the course. The majority of these were written for two of the eight modules—Digital Information Technologies & Architectures and Libraries & Publishing in an Information Society, tagged with “DITA” and “LAPIS” respectively—but some others were independent of either. I hope that this will give readers of this blog a flavour of some of the topics that I covered during this period.
- It From Bit: information theory—information as a fundamental building-block of the universe; how it is preserved and self-replicates.
- Ebony and ivory, in perfect harmony on my computer screen: blog design, colour theory and how it relates to website design and user experience, comparison of library OPAC designs.
- Clash of the titans: information retrieval using structured and unstructured queries in search engines; comparison of Google and Bing.
- Walking in a multimedia wonderland: Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) used to embed content and to create “mash-up” services; how they are supported on WordPress through shortcodes.
- A Demon of the Second Kind: Stanisław Lem’s take on information theory: Information theory again—the longstanding problem of Maxwell’s Demon and how it is treated humorously by the Polish science-fiction author.
- Library metadata standards in the Web 2.0 era: Metadata—its purposes, history and need for further development in the Digital Age.
- Mapping the Twitterverse: using the TAGS web application to analyse Twitter metadata by visualising the connections between users.
- The history of information on display: an illustrated visit to the Science Museum’s new Information Age gallery.
- Altmetrics in academia: the recent emergence of altmetrics to complement traditional citation metrics; the effect of this upon scholarly communication practices.
- Screwing around with text analysis: the rise of text analysis and the wider disciplinary study of Digital Humanities.
- At the coalface of information: a number of examples of contemporary academic projects that use text analysis and data mining.
- Moving towards a Web of Meaning: the use of text encoding to create a Semantic Web; more examples of webpages that already do so to support data mining.
- Self-reflection through DITA data analysis: applying many of the techniques and technologies discussed in the preceding posts to analyse my own social media “impact”.
- The artist in a hostile world: an artist’s role within an information society and the attendant pressures that may be applied upon him or her.
- The medium is the message, and the medium is changing: why information changes according to the form of media in which it is transmitted.
- What is an author, what is an audience, and can they be one and the same?: philosophical discussion on the changing nature and purpose of the author, his or her intellectual work, and its audience.
- Getting creative with copyright: history of copyright and piracy, and the recent development of Creative Commons licensing as an alternative to the existing paradigm.
- Crisis? What crisis?: the ever-increasing amount and cost of scholarly information, leading to the current “serials crisis” and a need for alternative publishing models.
- An introduction to classification: outline of the Dewey Decimal Classification and Library of Congress Classification systems.
- Opening up access: introducing the Open Access movement in contemporary academic publishing.
- Evolve or die: how recent technological and societal changes have influenced current practice within the publishing industry.
- Reductio ad Wikipedia?: the changing nature of the encyclopaedia and general reference works throughout history, from the Summa Theologica to Wikipedia.
- A library in a box: report on a panel discussion held at the Institut Français about the IdeasBox, a charitable project that aims to provide books and digital infrastructures to disadvantages communities.
- If you go down to the library today, you’re in for a big surprise: how libraries themselves are evolving due to the changing nature of their resources; how their societal roles and use of their physical spaces is being repurposed.
- The final chapter: more perspectives on new publishing formats and the difference between print and e-books.