Notes Week 7

How Internet Infrastructure Works
The internet is the formation of all the networks in the world connecting together. In 1964 there were only four host computer systems, not there are an insurmountable amount. The Internet Society is in charge of overseeing the policies and protocols of the internet. A Point of Presence (POP) is how local users use a company's network. There is no controlling network, just more high level networks that control things via Network Access Points. A router is used to communicate one computer with another. An IP address identifies your computer. Its made of octets with a Net section and a Host/Node section. The Net section identifies the computer's network it belongs to and the Host identifies the actual computer. A Domain Name System maps text names to IP addresses automatically so that a user doesn't have to manually connect to a network. Machines that provide services to other machines are the servers, the machines that connect to the servers are the clients. Protocols tell the computer how the client and server will communicate with each other.

Google
Google has over 100 projects. Many of these we have used already, such as the Desktop. Desktop is like a better version of the toolbar for your whole computer. The Google Foundation and Google Grants both work to "make the world a better place" by supporting numerous charities. Google Answers is a service that allows a user to ask researchers any question and have them research it for you. Adsense is a program that makes it so featured ads will be relevant to the individual user's interests. Orkut is a social network Google invented that is slowly gaining users. Google believes that they should make money from ads, not by having people pay for their search results.

Dismantling Library Systems-Pace
Integrated Library Systems (ILS) have to work hard to remain relevant and keep up with evolving technologies. They either must start over or retool to add new software to their system. It is highly discouraged to start over because it can make for a lot more work than is necessary and ruin what they had before. Pace says that ILS can either "continue to maintain large systems that use proprietary methods of interoperability and promise tight integration of services for their customers or choose to dismantle their modules in such a way that librarians can reintegrate their systems through web services and standards."