End of School

The semester is almost done, which is a great relief! I've finished my classes, and now have only assignments to do. One I handed in on Tuesday, and now there is just one left, due on Monday. All that's left for that one is a bit of editing. It's been a tough semester, a pretty boring one, so I'm glad to be nearly done!

I'm sick of talking about what I've been studying, so instead I'm going to talk about podcasts. I love podcasts! I listen to them quite a bit. It all started with Serial, which I think happened to a lot of people. From there, I found a whole lot of podcasts to subscribe to. I listen to a couple of history podcasts, Hardcore History and Emperors of Rome.  This American Life is also terrific. But I've chosen a couple of podcasts and episodes that have relevance to what I'm studying to highlight here.

Note to Self is a podcast about technology and "finding balance in the digital age." One episode that I found really interesting was on Turnitin, which is the software used to find plagiarism in student's work. They use it at RMIT, and it's pretty amazing technology. Here's the direct link to that episode: judging your originality in a cut and paste world

Another podcast that I listen to a lot is Radiolab. It's a show about science and technology, and sounds incredibly boring, but it isn't, it's really good. I picked one episode that has more relevance to digital stuff; called darkode, it's about hackers holding your computer for ransom and also about the website, part of the dark web, where hackers can share information and code.

Reply All is all about the internet, and has a funny segment called "yes yes no", where the hosts explain to the producer of the show what some meme or topical internet thing means. I've been finding that I understand a lot more of what they talk about now, which is kind of amazing.

DCC Lifecycle

from http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/curation-lifecycle-model

This is the digital lifecycle that we have been studying all semester in Digital Curation. It's from the Digital Curation Centre in the UK. The stages of this digital lifecycle are:

• Conceptualise
• Create
• Access and Use
• Appraise and Select
• Dispose
• Ingest 
• Preservation Action
• Reappraise
• Store 
• Access and Reuse
• Transform

Each week, we have been looking at a different stage of the lifecycle in class. Not going to lie, it's a fairly dry subject, and it's shown me that digital curation is not a possible career for me. I would hate it way too much. It's an important job, but not for me. 

Our final assignment for this subject is a scientific report, looking at one aspect of the DCC lifecyle. I've chosen to research the appraisal process. How is it that library organisations and businesses decide what digital information needs to be kept, and what can be thrown away? Does there even need to be an appraisal process, or can everything be kept forever? Hopefully it'll be interesting, and I won't put it off forever like I did the last assignment.