Reading Week # 6

1) Local Area Network: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Area_Network

This reading talks about LAN which stands for local area network. LAN is “a computer network covering a small physical area, like a home, office, or small group of buildings, such as a school, or an airport”. There are two kind of LAN: smaller and larger LAN .smaller LAN consists of one or more switches linked. But at least one of them connects to a router, cable modem, or ADSL modem for Internet access. However the lager LAN uses redundant linked with switches to prevent loops. Moreover LAN can be connected together through leased lines.

Computer network http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_networkCommon types of computer networks http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dpgqDdfUjQ

The second reading talks about Computer network. Computer Network is more than one computer and they are interconnected. There are three type of Wired technology: Twisted-Pair Wire (used in telephone), Coaxial Cable (TV) and Fiber Optics (transmits light). And there are six types Wireless Technologies: Terrestrial Microwave (satellite dishes), Communications Satellites(Earth-orbiting systems), Cellular and PCS Systems (antenna device), Wireless LANs, Bluetooth(open wireless protocol),and The Wireless Web(World Wide Web through equipments like cellular phones). Then it talks about type of networks and network topology such as bus network, star network, ring network, mesh network, star-bus network, tree or hierarchical topology network. All networks consists of hardware components.


Coyle, K. (2005). Management of RFID in libraries. Journal of Academic Librarianship

I did hear about RFID before when I was in a business school. But I did not know that RFID can help librarians in many ways. I like the ideas that Coyle points in her articles about how libraries can benefit in the future from this technology. Moreover, I hope in the future , RFID can solve many challenges that librarians face in library