Week 8: Readings

I admit to be over my head with the readings for this week. With my experience both very limited but extensive database records, nothing has prepared me for the readings for this week. The Greenspun online "book" "SQL for Nerds" is a combination of intelligible English and very detailed SQL language, and the W3Schools document is, typically for them, very technical with little bits of intelligible English. It's almost like I've never sat in front of a database before in my life.

Week 7: Muddiest Point

Having noted in last week's reading notes my experience with Microsoft Access, how does a Database Management System relate to individual database software? Does Access have its own DBMS? I realize that Access is not the fullest-functioning program, and I have limited Oracle experience. Can you expand on its function use, and choice of the DBMS?

Week 7 Readings

Beginning Relational Data Modeling

I have extensive experience setting up databases - particularly in Access (2400 books, 1300 cds, many other research tables) - and I've done some limited relational connections, but these chapters (2 & 3) are an excellent introduction to properly setting up relational databases and making the necessary connections between them. I already understood the majority of the terms in chapter 3, but the review and additional terms were very valuable.

An Introduction to Database Normalization and Fundamentals of Relational Database Design

These provided a succinct explanation (each) of what was covered in greater detail above, with a clear examples given.

More study of these issues would be helpful.

Week 5 Readings

Unfortunately, I was unable to read either of the two assigned readings, the first because there was no link to it, and the 19" of snow we received here in Pittsburgh prevented me from going in to Pitt to see if the library had it available.

The second reading had a link to it, but it leads nowhere, even with extensive searching on the Austrialian website university website.

Week 3 Muddiest Points

I need to look harder at the formulas given in the week 3 readings and lecture, though Prof. He's breakdown of them made a little more sense. I realize they're important for this subject, and if I can learn College Algebra at 46, I can learn to at least interact with these, but it was a bit daunting the first time through.

Week 4 Readings

Reading 1 lists various aspects of a good searcher: good communication skills, logic and flexibility, self confidence, spelling, grammar and typing skills (for accuracy). These features of searching staff members (note searching staff, not users), with no-one really possessing all the listed talents, still aide the searcher in his/her tasks.

Reading 2, an early article (1982) describes 3 existing methods for searching: building blocks, successive fractions and citation pearl growing, gives their pros and cons, then adds a fourth: "most specific or least posted facet first". They state that this "interactive scanning" method, while taking longer, will yield more results. They also give advice for implementing any of these four methods, such as flexibility, searching more specific aspects first, and using thesauri.

Reading 3 wouldn't open on my computer. I'll talk with the help desk about that tomorrow.

Reading 4 discusses search terms and their effectiveness, including: written statements taken from users' comments, users' domain knowledge, relevance feedback from retrieved items, database thesaurus, and terms derived from intermediaries. That said, they discovered that there was little interaction with algorithmic approaches. Broken down into models on the user side (surface, cognitive, situational, and affective), and on the system side (surface, engineering, processing and content) brought better results. One conclusion is that interaction with IR is still a human art, and can be improved and enhanced on the computer end, but it will require learning from that human art.

This fourth reading I would like to spend more time with, to fully understand it.