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.