I had been a little worried about fulfilling the technology requirement for my MLIS. In fact I and one of my friends continued to put it off in hopes that the requirement would change. We took the class together to support each other though it. She helped me often but checking in, and I helped her understand what was needed, and we both learned from each other’s mistakes. I was greatly surprised to discover that taking Information structures of XML with Bob Boiko was not the struggle I had anticipated.
He gave us a choice between more technical and less technical tracks, so we had greater control over the speed and difficulty of the materials. While I may not end up working directly with creating XML in my work, I have come away from this course with a much stronger understanding of the separation between format and content, and how one can manipulate content with out affecting format, or vise versa. Using the program Oxygen we created XML pages from scratch inputting data, as well as created schemas to better understand the content needed, and transforms to crate formatted and human-readable materials.
The concept and activity I most struggled with in this course was that of the schema—as I began the course I didn’t see the point in having one, as it didn’t DO anything- it didn’t’ hold data like the XML page and it didn’t make the data readable as per the transform. After working through several projects and lectures I now understand that the schema is important in knowing what you need in an XML page—what information you’re looking for and how that information is arranged within a hierarchy of information. To be able to see how XML is used in my library catalog, government websites, and even restaurant menus allows me to have a greater understanding of the storage and presentation of information that we use everyday in my work with the public and information.
No comments:
Post a Comment