Highlights:
- little data = can be done on your own workstation
- big data = beyond basic computing
- big data: so much data that you need special handling because of its size
- big data is always moving, as our increasing abilities for more storage, more speed is constantly improving
- Living with Big Data: Challenges and Opportunities report
- storage systems – redundancy
- fault tolerance
- compression
- debugging
- performance tuning
- latency reduction
- Example of big data projects:
- Google Translate leveraging patterns of language use by reviewing websites with multiple language options (ex: Canadian government websites in English and French), instead of rule-based grammar systems
- Google Books and the Ngram Viewer to track changes in culture and expressions such as the United States is vs. the United States are
- Implications for librarians – we have the interpersonal relationships and technical database skills to help navigate and organize messy data
- Future big data possibilities for librarians:
- medical information collection
- hospital/laboratory/clinical informatics
- personalized medicine
- wellness informatics