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.