IRLS 675 Unit 11 part 2

Personally, I think that all of the installation and configuration done in 672 and 675 is very valuable. It may be from my desire to know how things work. However, if one would end up at a small library, you may need to do this yourself to get a small digital archive project up and going. Also, this information would at least give you some idea if IT people are trying to snow you with over estimates of time and cost to set something up. And you would also get an understanding of any problems they might be having.
I think even though it is brief(I barely remember some of the experiences with some of the software and have to go back and refresh my memory of them), I think we get enough experience with the various repository software. After entering a certain number of items, one gets the idea of how it is going to work. It would be helpful if all or most of them could be running side by side. That would be the easiest way to compare their function.

IRLS 675 Unit 11

I think they are all very useful for digital archiving, especially for those organizations on a tight budget or smaller organization. They can also be used by big organizations too. I think dspace would be the best for ingesting large quantities of data and linking remote organizations together. For more focus on meta data, omeka and drupal would be best. As I've said before, since drupal is more a general library product, it has more features than are really needed for most digital archives. I liked dspace and eprints for having the configurable approval process for someone to look over the submissions and give the okay before a submission is put online.

Usability and searchability are very important also. You need to people that are going to want to use them. I don't recall any of them as being difficult to browse or search with. omeka was one of the more inviting ones from my point of view as far as the layout and the thumbnails being shown. dspace was the one that has the least appealing appearance if I remember correctly.


Standards are important, and to have a standardized way to harvest meta data is a very good thing to have to be able to make more archives visible to the maximum number of people. jhove is also important to make sure that your archive records are in a standard form that can be used by the most people and will likely be standard for years into the future.

IRLS 675 Unit 10

Looking at University of Arizona's Institutional Repository, I did a search on “Auto” and the first entry was “The Low Rider Ritual: Social Mobility On Wheels”. It was easy to see it came from the “Arizona Anthropologist” collection. It can be useful to search this collection, but it is so diverse that there may not be many collections that overlap in their subjects. So having them all together may be convenient, but it may not yield any results from multiple collections. Another one I looked at, the Perseus collections. It was easy again to find which collection a particular item was from. This collection is more homogeneous, being texts and other artifacts from antiquity. So I was able to find things from multiple collections using a single search term. The third one I looked at, Norwegian Open Research Archives, is similar to Perseus in that the type of information is similar and I am able to search for a term and get information from multiple repositories. The archive is listed next to the item.

Regarding oaister.org, this is good if you want a site that you can search on a large number of repositories. It would allow you to find a large number of items if that is what you are looking for. The negative can be the large amount of information that can be returned and the amount of time it may take to search. Looking through the large amount of information and trying to make sense of all of it may be a problem also. It is like what you have to deal with when using google’s large amount of information.

IRLS 675 Unit 9

My collection of images is pretty straightforward. The topic is images of music collectibles. The image is either a photograph or an image of some kind of music collectible. So it is easy, I think to be consistent in my cataloging. Keywords are usually the artist, year, type (program, ticket, CD, etc.), Title of Album if it has something to do with an album or its tour, and whether it includes an autograph. So the information can be entered straightforwardly and consistently, I believe. I have not worked in a library yet so I have no real world experience on cataloging or anything like that. So I have to go on what I know so far.

I used all those as keywords in DSpace, which I believe was a time saver while still being complete. So DSpace would be the cheapest solution for me because of the straightforwardness of its operation with my collection and also the completeness, without too much extra that I do not use.

IRLS 675 Unit 8

This eprints installation was pretty straightforward. I thought the other two were pretty straightforward also. Of course, it helped to have very good instructions. I changed the welcome message and the logo. Both were pretty easy although I was really careful editing the message so as not to mess up the file. Right now I'd say I'm the least comfortable with configuring eprints probably because I haven't really done a lot yet. I found DSpace and Drupal fairly easy to configure also. DSpace and eprints are not as configurable as Drupal, but they have a more limited function than Drupal. eprints seems to be mostly text based, which can be cryptic to change. As long as you know what your doing, it can be changed more quickly than, say Drupal, which has a lot of configuration through the GUI. Drupal's GUI can get tedious if you need to do a lot of changing, although there is a way to import stuff. However, the GUI can keep you from making mistakes and can guide you without looking at as much documentation. Overall, I think I favor DSpace for my collection at the present time, although next week that may change after I use eprints some more.

IRLS 675 Unit 7

A concern I have is the amount of different software packages there are out there and the fact that institutions, like Stanford are still creating their own digital repository software. To me, this leads to a lot of inefficiency and waste. I know that the technology has not matured yet and at some point I would think there will be market consolidation. But right now, especially with budgets being tight, institutions need to really think about using something that is off the shelf, rather than developing their own. Stanford is doing that now with their second generation plan. I think more institutions, if they haven't already, will leverage their plans off of one of the existing software packages. This will hopefully improve the existing software and bring total costs down, while still allowing for innovation.

IRLS 675 Unit 6

The install went pretty well. It was another long one. I missed the sentence about the password should be dspace or I would need to change it in that configuration file. So I had to go back and start from an earlier snapshot and start from there, first changing the dspace password, then starting maven over. So that took some time. The instructions were good as usual. I am usually able to follow them easily unless I am in a hurry and miss something. Even with my background in software engineering, I did next to nothing with installing and configuring any applications on any of the flavors of unix I used. So I would probably not be able to do this myself without learning more and asking for help.

IRLS 675 Unit 5

I added the "site map" drupal module. I first wanted the Google Analytics but I needed to create some kind of tracking id for google and I was having trouble logging into my google account so I abandoned that one. There wouldn't be that much usage to track anyways. Normally I think tracking would give good feedback of what people like and don't like.

I like what the site map does, mapping out everything on my site in various subject headings and lists all of my object meta data fields and their members. It also has RSS feeds. Pretty simple module as far as enabling and configuring. I just followed the installation instructions exactly and made it available to everyone and it worked. It gives me a better visual picture of what is contained in my site and helps me understand drupal more.

IRLS 675 Unit 4

I see my collection as much like the Arizona memory project. Both contain a lot of images of various things. I like the way the AMP was set up and since they use Drupal, my collection of images of music items can be set up much in the same way. However, the way my stuff is displayed by drupal right now is not that great. you have to click on something, then click on its image to get to see it. On AMP, the images have little preview icon images you can see that is more aesthetically pleasing. Mine does not. I looked around a little to see how that could be done but couldn't find anything. Maybe a little bit of PHP is involved.

IRLS 675 Unit 2

I read "Luwak: a content management solution" by Matt Benzing. It discusses a content management system called Luwak, that uses XML, a database, and XSLT, a style sheet language. That is what we are doing in the technology side of the class with Drupal. It was done at the Dressler Research Libraries for their online content. The idea was to separate the content from the formatting so that it is flexible to work on multiple devices. Handheld devices were the original catalyst for doing this. Traditional HTML webpages are slow and unwieldy on handhelds. Converting the HTML pages to XML had a few hiccups, including in determining syntax errors and spelling errors but overall the transition over to it went smoothly, according to the paper.

They also mentioned it was easier to maintain and support. They didn't even need style sheets for different browsers after trying the site out.

I've heard that story of Luwak coffee beans before. It still seems disgusting.

VPN client

The VPN client seems to crash my macbook. I get kernel panics when it is running.

IRLS 675 Unit 3

Shoot, I guess I forgot to blog last week. I'll work on that tomorrow. Looks like I managed to post to the discussion last week at least. Too many personal issues going on right now. Anyway:

The tech assignment is about the right pace for me so far. Of course, I have extensive computer experience, software development experience, etc. Web servers are new to me, though. I had done html and cgi before but I would just put them in a certain directory and it would magically work. Doing all the creating this week got a little tedious, but the info has to get in there somehow. I wonder if I am taking on too much this semester with 671, 675, and 524 plus a quarter time Graduate Assistant-ship. I guess I will find out.

675 Unit 1

The collection I thought of is my collection of music related stuff. It is reasonably diverse, consisting of ticket stubs, autographed memorabilia, programs, T-shirts, special editions of vinyl records like picture disks and such. I have some of it up on my Facebook account: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=6717&id=1726221208 http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=19703&id=1726221208 http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=12278&id=1726221208 plus, I'll see if I can get my concert programs from my ex-to-be and digitize a few of those. One could search by artist, type of item, year, whether autographed or not, scanned or photographed, if picture disk, and anything else I can think of in the meantime. People that are interested in that type of music, especially stuff from the 80's mostly are the people that would access it.

Unit 12, project management

A lot of reading. I found the ones by Cervone were the best. They seemed to be similar to what we were doing at my previous job, especially the Standard Methodology one. We did assess risk of each defect: customer impact number = probability times severity. Would have to sign off on release of known defects that were above a certain customer impact number. Also, the 'what not to do' one. it is easy to get in the habit of not doing things you know you should be doing. That one is a wake up call. Project management was becoming a big deal where I used to work, so much so that writing software was starting to be considered grunt work, although if you don't have experience doing it, you are going to run into a lot of problems. There has got to be a balance. From a library project point of view, that is not something to be focused on, though. That is the vendor's responsibility.

Unit 11, php

Finally, I am getting things done early.....

I have come a ways since the beginning of this class, especially in the last few weeks. I learned a lot about relational databases, having never had experienced them before. I learned the different ways to access them and how powerful they can be. I also learned this week about php, which looks a lot like perl to me. At least in some of the syntax. It looks to be very useful in web programming with databases. I wonder if this puts me a leg up on my former java programmer co-workers. It's always nice to learn something new in technology that you can put on your resume. I don't think it has changed my perspective too much on digital information. It is the present and the future and is going to be a part of most librarians' jobs.

more on unit 10, working on databases

I left assignment 14 for last. Boy, I had to go back though the uacbt stuff on mysql. It is one thing to say, "okay, i understand what you are doing in the lessons", but quite another to do the same thing with a different database and make it work. Fortunately, once you get going, you can use your last example as a stepping stone for the next db query. My Mac crashed in the middle so I had to do some things over. I wish they would have replaced the hard drive when they fixed it after I dropped it.

unit 10, working on databases

This was the most challenging and the most work for me so far. I knew it probably was going to be seeing that the only database experience I've had is from Microsoft access in irls 571.

Some of the query concepts were kind of familiar from stuff I did at my last job. We had a defect/fix tracking tool that had a database underneath it. To generate reports you would do queries much like what we have done in class here. However, most people had scripts or they would use a GUI to do the queries that they wanted. The GUI would output the query command it was doing so that was helpful if you wanted to do something similar.

It was good to see the different ways of doing things with command line and the two GUIs. The way it was presented helped me understand it pretty fast. The tutorials were good too.

I had some additional work cut out for me as I had to replace my friend's router this week after the old one died. This one has an address of 192.168.2.1 for whatever reason. So I had to change some things in my ubuntu VM. I don't want to spend time changing the router, although sometime maybe I'll experiment. The default is encryption enabled on the wireless. He has it in a covered area between the guest house where I stay and the main house so that both can get wireless reception. However, both of us have wired connections as it is still faster even though in theory the wireless should be as fast. Having it outside exposed to heat and dust probably means it probably won't last long either. Someday he plans on enclosing the area. That is the only solution that will keep the electronics working longer.

The last project I worked on where I was working had a database inside the product to track various things. However, some of the stuff had to be taken out of there and stored in shared machine memory. The database was just too slow and was affecting performance to a very unacceptable degree.

Unit 9 - database

Data modeling and ERD is similar to designing for Object-oriented programing so those concepts are familiar to me. Databases are not. However, irls 571 gave me an introduction to databases and the normalization process via Microsoft Access(what kind of a name for a database program is that?). I can't say I'm an expert on that so that will be challenging and fun in the coming weeks. Especially using MySQL, which is new to me.

Unit 8 assignment

I think it was the first one I read, but I was really impressed out by the ALA plan. The thoroughness and directions on how to get to reach their goals really knocked me out. This looked like a plan, if followed, would have a high chance of success.

The Department of Education seemed like more of a political piece of BS geared to show what a great job they are doing and why they deserve more money from congress. I used to see these kind of presentations at my previous job and those were usually the products/projects that would fail. They would also put people to sleep if it was presented in a meeting. I remember being unimpressed with Rod Page. This document is a reminder of why.

The Dugan "Information Technology plans" seemed to be another document filled with good information on how to plan and execute.

I think my course of study, especially the Digital information certificate courses, plus my background in computers, should help a lot with me helping out in future technology planning. If I had been in the part of IBM that deals with that directly, IGS, I would even have more knowledge. My knowledge of how to administrate computers, modems and routers has got to help also. A lot of it was from trial and error, due to lack of good support (talking to someone in India was rarely helpful), so that experience should help a lot.

Unit 7 quiz

I feel like an idiot after the METS question. My stubbornness in solving problems gets the best of me sometimes. I don't know if I should feel bad that I spent so much time on it. Maybe I should have settled for a 9/10. I finally figured out the answer to questions 2. I had just been very lazy in my reading.

Unit 7 assignment

One of my last jobs was maintaining and adding to machine status in the form of an xml file. That made me pretty familiar with the assignment of creating xml. I picked some pictures from my iPhoto collection to use as the objects for my examples. So if we ever do anything with the xml file, I will have real photos behind it.

The code that I had to maintain was kind of sloppy as far as how it would look at the xml. A C++ xml parser (Xerces?) was used to parse the xml and then C code was written to read and manipulate the linked objects created by the parser. Then a final call to the parser was made to write it back out. There was also an xsd file to describe the structure of what the elements of the xml would be and also their attributes. I ended up re-writing a major part of the C code to be recursive because the values of status were hierarchical for the tape server. Bad status would cascade up the hierarchical structure and change the status of the object at the next level. Where there was more than a single point of failure, the status going up would be just degraded. Where there were single points of failure, like if the operating system crashed(think O-rings and tiles on the space shuttle), the state of the machine would go to 'failed', which shouldn't happen very often.

By the way, there were 70 single points of failure on the space shuttle and there was a statistical certainty (I have an article from 1990 somewhere) that we would loose another one before the space station was done. Why did we do it anyway? And why wasn't anyone ever held accountable for either shuttle disaster?

The quiz this week is what has really got me. I must have fell asleep while I was reading the parts I am struggling with. Good thing I have more opportunities. Or maybe its the METS baseball team that is trowing me off :)

Unit 6 assignment

Finishing these at the last minute seems to becoming a habit for me. It didn't help that I had a big assignment in 520 that I finished Sunday night and had four days were I was busy out of town. I am going to try to do better this week and finish early.
I was all gung-ho on creating a new vm and then realized I better follow the directions after I got to a screen where I didn't know what to do. I ended up having to delete my mis-created vm partition and start over and follow the directions. I had to go back later and install the webadmin stuff.

For the web page assignment, I just moved my 504 stuff into a subdirectory so it would be out of the way and started over. I am fairly familiar with the html language and have done a little of it. However, I do need to look up stuff and look at examples because it has been a while. Not sure how unique my digital libraries are. I put ones I thought were interesting/useful.

My webpage is: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~timv1/

Unit 5 assignment

This week was pretty straightforward as the router was already set up previously and I have had some experience doing it. Luckily, the routers pretty much set themselves up these days and have good firmware. 10 years ago when I was trying to set up one at home with help from a friend things didn't just work right away out of the box. Also, you had to update firmware in order to get VPN software to work. With this router, it took me a while to locate the page that told how many connection ips were available. Each one is set up different.

which reminds me, our first broadband was sprint broadband, which I think was microwaves to and from an antenna in the Tucson mountains. We could not get a second phone line at the time because they were out in our area. No cox or quest broadband internet was available for years. We stayed with sprint until they said they had to cease to give up the frequencies to the government.

I have been able to learn from the assignments whatever form they have been in. The videos have been very helpful. Wikipedia seems to have pretty good definitions and information.

As far as how I learn, I think I am a active learner. I learn better by doing. However, I am not that good in groups, something I need to work on. Although I do like to teach others. In contrast, my wife is not that way. So even though we both have computer engineering degrees, she knows very little about our windows computer at home. I have to show her everything. She is not willing to sit down and fiddle with things until she gets it working. So I've put in all the hours to figure things out. It should be interesting now that we are headed for divorce what she is going to do when it comes to computers. She is now determined not to ask for my help with anything.

Unit 4 assignments

Everything went pretty well. At first, I had typos in the packages names for the wget commands and got the 404 errors. I checked the discussion board for my problem but nothing for what I was doing wrong. Quadruple checking the names did the trick. Brought up the webadmin with no problem. I ran into those certificate problems at my previous job every time they upgraded the lab firewall, so I knew how to handle those.

Adding user and group using the command line went well. Never used those commands but was familiar with the concepts. Never looked in the /etc/group and /etc/passwd before. Funny story from my next to last employer: one group that contained a lot of people kept overflowing and knocking the alphabetical last person out whenever someone was added. She would have to send an email around to all the users in the group to have themselves removed if they left the team. Not sure what the limit was, but I'm guessing either 128 or 256 for binary reasons. This was on HP-UX unix.

adding a user on the sandbox went okay once I remembered where to look for the password. Using the Webmin went well also. I could not bring up the site http://www.doxfer.com/Webmin/UsersAndGroups but didn't need it. Browser says it can't find it.

ubuntu 1004 must be good

In this person's article, he says he had trouble finding things he didn't like and says it is one of the best operating system there is:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/10-things-not-to-like-about-ubuntu-1004/35713?tag=nl.e539

week 3

The hands on assignment went smooth. of course it was magic when I typed the commands to update the software. I know it goes and looks at the config file I changed and then installed the new software. but you always feel uncomfortable the first time doing that.

my favorite text editor is xemacs. I used it for about 15 years at intel and IBM. I really don't like vi but I probably did not give it a chance. It just seemed so cryptic and complicated at first. I am familiar with basic commands with vi but I am so much more productive with xemacs. I even had xemacs on my windows pc.

I have changed configurations on DOS computers, AIX, and even have messed around in the windows registry with regedit. I mistakenly used the wrong tax year with the program "Itsdeductable" and the only way I could get it to reset was to uninstall and then go searching in the registry for all instances of anything with that name and delete it and then reinstall. I also used rededit with sprint broadband service to make the tcpip packet size bigger so that the broadband was faster. You would make smaller for internet gaming.

With my mac, i have only used the "system preferences" to config it. I also have a program called "MacTuneUp" which I have also used. No editing of files so far.

accessing remote desktop

We used VNC at my last job. We would access our office PC from the testing lab mostly for email and instant messaging. This was before they gave us all laptops. It took a while for the light to go on in my head that I had used it before so it was a pseudo-new experience for me. Very straightforward to use. IBM had an internal product for this but it was complicated, buggy, and much slower than this. Hopefully it was put out of its misery.

I have used linux before. I had it installed on my laptop as part of a dual-boot machine with windows. ended up not using it much because I was just so busy at work. Also developed on it. So the tutorials went over pretty familiar stuff.

Installing ubuntu server in VMWare was pretty straightforward and uneventful on my mac. It did download some components that it said it didn't have, which I did not see happen in the youtube videos so maybe I forgot to do something earlier. It was pretty cool to be remotely accessing a virtual machine even though I've done those kind of things in the past. I got a great sense of accomplishment and relief when everything was working correctly, alot like I did when software I developed would work.

Ubantu user forum reveiw and blog post

My first thought of this post was: “you mean you didn’t make a backup copy of the file before you started messing with it? I imagine we will not have to change these kinds of files very much in our class.

I messed up my fstab! - can no longer access or have limited access to most drive

It is good to experiment with stuff on computers, but you have to be careful or what you learn may come at a large price: non-working computer and lost time.

One thing I learned is that trying to catch up on schoolwork in the middle of the night might not work. This blog was down for maintenance.

test

my start to catch up.