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.