Class 5

Compression, especially for posting on the web, is very useful to reduce the amount of time and space needed for the transferred file. I understand the basic concepts of lossless and lossy compression, but found the concept of lossless much easier to follow from the Data Compression Basics reading. After having these methods described I am wondering if compression is something that is done manually or if programs automatically compress when a file is uploaded or transferred. Once again I am very amazed at the intellect and ability of computer scientists to create the algorithms and equations needed to make these compressions possible.

After I had made my way through the first two articles I was curious as to how compression applied to library science. I was pleasantly surprised with an answer in the next two readings. Although I was overwhelmed, even by the simplified version, of the amount of skill needed to compression work, it is good to know the skills would be useful in very practical ways. The digital library of photographs as stated has specific sizes for each photograph on how it is portrayed online. These images are not at the full quality, but take advantage of compression to make the images easily available online. Using You Tube again would require understanding at least how the video would be affected in quality and what aspects would be altered through compression. Although one would not need to carry out the compressions, the results of the compression would be useful to know.


This week I commented on Sr Becky's Blog and Maggie's Blog. See blog list