3.11 References and Resources

URLs:

Blog: http://aghalsey.blogspot.com

Webpage: http://www.student.city.ac.uk/~abgy261/

JavaScript: http://www.student.city.ac.uk/~abgy261/javascript.html

References:

Articulate. (2009) E-Learning Software and Authoring Tools. [Online] Available from: http://www.articulate.com/ [Accessed 30 September 2009].

ASP. (2009) The Official Microsoft ASP.NET site. [Online] Available from: http://www.asp.net/ [Accessed 8 December 2009].

Bates, M. J. (1989) 'The design of browsing and berrypicking techniques for the online search interface'. Online Review, 13(5), pp. 407-424.

Berners-Lee, T. (1999) Weaving the Web: the origins and future of the World Wide Web. London: Orion Business.

Bing. (2009) [Online] Available from: http://www.bing.com/ [Accessed 29 November 2009].

Bishop, L. (2007) 'Moving data into and out of an institutional repository: Off the map and into the territory'. IASSIST Quarterly. Fall and Winter, 2007. [Online] Available from: http://www.iassistdata.org/publications/iq/iq31/
iqvol313bishop.pdf [Accessed 10 November 2009].

Bosak, J. and Bray, T. (1999), 'XML and the Second-Generation Web', Scientific American, 280(5), pp. 89-94.

Bush, V. (1945) 'As We May Think'. The Atlantic Monthly. July 1945. [Online] Available from:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush [Accessed 9 October 2009].

Chapman, C. (2009) 'The Evolution of Web Design'. Six Revisions. [Online] Available from: http://sixrevisions.com/web_design/
the-evolution-of-web-design/ [Accessed 1 December 2009].

Delicious (2009) Delicious Social Bookmarking. [Online] Available from: http://delicious.com/ [Accessed 28 September 2009].

Digg (2009) Digg - The Latest News Headlines, Videos and Images. [Online] Available from: http://digg.com/ [Accessed 28 September 2009].

Dublin Core Metadata Initative (2009) Making it easier to find information. [Online] Available from: http://dublincore.org/ [Accessed 9 November 2009].

Engard, N.C. (2009) Library mashups: exploring new ways to deliver library data. London: Facet Publishing.

Flickr (2009) Welcome to Flickr. [Online] Available from: http://www.flickr.com/ [Accessed 20 October 2009].

Google (2009) About Google Books. [Online] Available from: http://books.google.co.uk/intl/en/googlebooks/about.html [Accessed 20 October 2009].

Henderson, M. (2000) 'FM Interviews: Louise Addis'. First Monday, 5(5). [Online] Available from: http://131.193.153.231/www/issues/
issue5_5/addis/index.html [Accessed 9 October 2009].

Intute (2009) Home. [Online] Available from: http://www.intute.ac.uk/ [Accessed 20 December 2009].

Jadu (2009) Jadu Content Management Systems. [Online] Available from: http://www.jadu.co.uk/ [Accessed 20 December 2009].

JavaScript Lint (2009) Online Lint. [Online] Available from: http://www.javascriptlint.com/online_lint.php [Accessed 8 December 2009].

Krill, P. (2008) 'JavaScript creator ponders past, future'. InfoWorld. June 23 2008. [Online] Available from: http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/
javascript-creator-ponders-past-future-704
[Accessed 8 December 2009].

Krill, P. (2009) 'Eich: JavaScript getting faster, could displace Flash'. InfoWorld. November 6 2009. [Online] Available from: http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/
eich-javascript-getting-faster-could-kill-flash-251
[Accessed 8 December 2009].

Matthews, R. (2004) JPG vs GIF for Web Images. [Online] Available from: http://www.wfu.edu/~matthews/misc/jpg_vs_gif/
JpgVsGif.html [Accessed 20 October 2009].

Morville, P. and Rosenfeld, L. (2006) Information architecture for the World Wide Web. 3rd ed. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly.

Open Ajax Alliance. (2009) Introducing Ajax and OpenAjax. [Online] Available from: http://www.openajax.org/whitepapers/
Introducing%20Ajax%20and%20OpenAjax.php [Accessed 8 December 2009].

Open Content Alliance (2009) [Online] Available from: http://www.opencontentalliance.org/ [Accessed 20 October 2009].

Palfrey, J. and Gasser, U. (2008) Born digital: understanding the first generation of digital natives. New York: Basic Books.

Pitti, D. (1999) 'Encoded Archival Description: an introduction and overview'. D-Lib Magazine, 5(11). [Online] Available from: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november99/
11pitti.html [Accessed 10 November 2009].

Prensky, M. (2001) Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. [Online] Available from: http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/ [Accessed 9 October 2009]

Samuelson, P. (2009) 'Google Books is Not a Library'. The Huffington Post. October 13 2009. [Online] Available from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/pamela-samuelson/
google-books-is-not-a-lib_b_317518.html [Accessed 20 October 2009].

SIMILE Project (2009). About SIMILE. [Online] Available from: http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/SIMILE:About [Accessed 20 October 2009].

Stanford University (2005) The Medlane Project. [Online] Available from: http://xmlmarc.stanford.edu/ [Accessed 10 November 2009].

TARO (unknown) List of repositories. [Online] Available from: http://lib.utexas.edu/taro/browse/index.html [Accessed 20 December 2009].

TEI (2004) A gentle introduction to XML. [Online] Available from: http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p4-doc/html/SG.html [Accessed 10 November 2009].

University of Leeds (2009) [Online] Available from: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ [Accessed 20 December 2009].

Validome.com (2009) Validator for XML Documents. [Online] Available from: http://www.validome.org/xml/ [Accessed 10 November 2009].

W3C (2004) What is the Document Object Model? [Online] Available from: http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-3-Core/introduction.html [Accessed 13 November 2009].

W3C (2009a) The W3C Markup Validation Service. [Online] Available from: http://validator.w3.org/ [Accessed 13 November 2009]

W3C (2009b) The Extensible Stylesheet Language Family (XSL). [Online] Available from: http://www.w3.org/Style/XSL/ [Accessed 13 November 2009].

WebMonkey (2008) JavaScript Tutorial. [Online] Available from: http://www.webmonkey.com/tutorial/JavaScript_Tutorial [Accessed 8 December 2009].

Wilson, T.D. (1999) 'Models in information behaviour research'. Journal of Documentation. 55(3), pp. 249-270.

Resources Used:

ADAM (unknown) Boolean search tips. [Online] Available from: http://adam.ac.uk/info/boolean.html - a simple guide to Boolean searching.

Beighley, L. (2007) Head First SQL. Cambridge: O'Reilly. - an entertaining(!) and readable guide teaching the basics of manipulating relational databases using SQL.

Castro, E. (2007) HTML, XHTML and CSS: visual quickstart guide. 6th ed. Berkeley, CA: Peachpit Press. - a comprehensive guide that helped me out in writing HTML and CSS for this module, pitched at a fairly advanced level for people who already have some familiarity with the technologies but wish to take their skills further.

Flickr (2009) [Online] Available from: http://www.flickr.com - a Web 2.0 site containing a vast amount of images. The image of the typewriter keys used in my header was taken by Jetheriot and is available for manipulation under a Creative Commons licence.

Freeman, E. (2006) Head First HTML with CSS and XHTML. Farnham: O'Reilly. - a lively introduction to HTML and CSS, with an emphasis on creating valid websites which are cross-browser compatible. Good for absolute beginners, although I have been using HTML and CSS for several years and learned plenty of new skills from this book.

GIMP (2009) [Online] Available from: http://www.gimp.org/- a freely distributed image manipulation programme for raster graphics.

Moncur, M. (2006) Sams teach yourself JavaScript in 24 hours. 3rd ed. Hemel Hampstead: Prentice Hall. - a little bit too detailed for what I needed to know for this module, and JavaScript requires so much practice I doubt anyone could learn it in 24 hours, but this book certainly helped me with Exercise 3.9.

nsftools.com (unknown) Microsoft Windows Command-Line FTP Command List. [Online] Available from: http://www.nsftools.com/tips/MSFTP.htm - an invaluable resource of FTP commands for putting my files on my City WebSpace using the Windows command line prompt.

Ray, E. T. (2003) Learning XML. 2nd ed. Sebastopol: O'Reilly. - broad, brief reference on XML although lacking in practical examples.

Stanicek, P. (2009) Color Scheme Designer 3. [Online] Available from: http://colorschemedesigner.com/ - very useful website for creating visually appealing colour schemes, allowing you to preview how text will appear on a page, and tweaking with the contrast, brightness and intensity of schemes. You can either pick a colour, or enter a hex code of a colour you wish to base your site around.

Whatis.com (2009) [Online] Available from: http://whatis.techtarget.com/ - somewhat laden with advertisments, but a useful primer on providing succinct definitions and clarifying the concepts learned during lectures.

W3Schools (2009) Online Web Tutorials. [Online] Available from: http://www.w3schools.com/ - wide range of tutorials covering standards-compliant SQL, CSS, XML, JavaScript and HTML, with a wide range of try-it-yourself examples. An integral resource for the module.

Exercise 3.10 -- Information Architectures

Information architecture is at the heart of what librarians do. DITA has taught me how to organise, categorise and classify information in a digital environment and teach users that a wide variety of search strategies must be employed to find what they need (Bates, 1989). Palfrey (2008) has highlighted how children born today have digital dossiers containing information on them before they are born, but being exposed to digital technologies does not equate to expertise in finding, managing and critically evaluating information. With the amount of global digital information growing exponentially, there will always be a need to guide people through it and collate disparate information into quality resources, so the role of a librarian shows no signs of obsolescence.

Organisation schemes are vital in collating digital information. Morville and Rosenfeld (2006) highlight the use of shallow hybrid schemes. An example is Leeds University's website, powered by the document-centred Jadu Content Management System. The site blendes exact alphabetical organisation schemes and ambiguous task-oriented schemes. Non-hybrid schemes are useful for subject gateways such as Intute, but not for sites like TARO where an alphabetical scheme has been used to classify topical and geographic information. Consideration must also be given to labels. Leeds University's site shows examples of ambiguous labels ('big ideas') and discrepancies and duplication in labelling ('Leeds and Yorkshire', 'Why Leeds?' and 'Choosing Leeds'.) This week's task of identifying a mystery vegetable shows how difficult it is to find information without consistent labelling: is kohlrabi a stalk, bulb or root vegetable or a brassica? For a user to find this information, it must be indexed as all four.

Felicitous information architectures will be organised to reflect their user's needs. A site without 'bells and whistles' is preferable to a visually aesthetic site offering disorganised chaos. Unfortunately, not all those creating and organising digital information are mindful of this fact.

Exercise 3.9 -- Client side programming

This week, we learned how JavaScript can be used to add interactivity to web pages. JavaScript was developed by Brendan Eich in 1995 as a flexible language that web designers with little programming experience could quickly learn (Krill, 2008). It is primarily used as a client-side programming language executed by the browser, although server-side JavaScript platforms such as ASP also exist.

In the exercise, we used JavaScript to elicit information from users to direct them to an appropriate hyperlink. The WebMonkey tutorial aided me in this exercise, as did the JavaScript lint online validator which allowed me to check my code for errors. I added a while loop so users would be prompted to re-enter information if they entered information which did not match that defined in the variable. I experimented with window.display to redirect users automatically or open hyperlinks in new windows, but felt users would rather decide for themselves if they wanted to visit the hyperlink. My finished programme is available from http://www.student.city.ac.uk/~abgy261/javascript.html .

The exercise gave me confidence in writing simple scripts. At work, I could use JavaScript to direct users to subject-specific resources, or a version of a web page tailored to their Internet Browser. JavaScript has far more sophisticated applications, however. Web technologies such as AJAX use it to bring together technologies such as CSS, XHTML and XML (Open Ajax Alliance, 2009) and power applications such as Google Maps which update in real-time and do not require plug-ins, improving speed and usability. Though JavaScript has existed for fourteen years, it is a potent high-level programming language and I am inclined to agree with Brendan Eich's assertion that in the future, "we'll see even more JavaScript." (Krill, 2009)