Unit 13 VM out of the box?

Well, I would have loved to download preinstalled VMs and definitely believe that I personally would have saved time by downloading them, fully formed from the forehead of Zeus. I realize that as I was learning more and more about software, computers, installation and configuration that I was making the big mistakes and getting hung up when I actually took the time to read the slew of dialog boxes that were thrown at me instead of simply selecting the options that were the default settings. But I have to say there was a high degree of pedagogical/learning value in going over this. I definitely got better, more familiar with and more comfortable with setting up VMs as the semester progressed- setting up and running CMS based repositories  not so much. Given my druthers and my fierce prejudice against the command environment, I would have liked to have started off with Omeka for an easy win to have some positive psychological momentum to carry me forward with Drupal, DSpace and EPrints (which I am still struggling to install so as to harvest from the Omeka OAI-PMH). As they told Napoleon: you've gotta defeat Austria before you invade Russia. Well maybe not, but in terms of tackling projects, I definitely like to pace things where I am handling things incrementally more difficult than the last project I accomplished.
However, as eternally dissatisfied with things as I know I can be, I feel if I had downloaded a complete VM, I know I would feel I had been cheated had I been denied the opportunity to build a VM from scratch, at least the first couple of times. Honestly, I wish there were some GUI method of doing it that did not rely on my deteriorating typing skills where I could just click on a series of radio buttons, especially with setting up DSpace with its Java and GreSQL variations. I guess the subsequent question for me is: what is now considered the baseline level of IT equipment and service that a library should have?

Unit 12

So far with the databases we have dealt with this semester I feel that the home sites of Drupal and Duraspace were the most impressive. Omeka's seemed friendly enough, but I am still struggling to simply move the Berlin theme from my downloads folder to the "Settings" directory which does not seem to exist in the directory for Omeka in my VM. I spent the better part of an hour trying to accomplish this when it struck me that the IP address could have changed while my laptop was very inconveniently updating applications when it should have been up and ready for me to work. Nevertheless, I ran the ol' ifconfig command and got the exact same addy I had before. So I've got to continue exhausting all alternatives. For some reason the FTPs nowadays are incredibly harder to use than say, Fetch which I used in 2003 with no difficulty, but I was working with folders that used names in an environment where I had much better bearing regarding where I was and what I was doing. So, in short: Omeka might be better if my searches for "install content" or "upload objects to Omeka database" returned anything useful instead of attenuated threads from user groups with no relevance to what I was searching for. As I have stated before, technology certainly has its own controlled vocabulary and if you do not know it, you are lost. User friendly sites and systems would at least offer suggest search terms. My DB lacks a theme and any way to upload content to it and the Omeka home page hasn't been exactly transparent in how I can find these data. I'm realizing that applications I had mastered in the past were those where instruction was face to face and frequently recurring. I think this will be the last time I attempt to learn any software by remote classroom, I don't know how others cope with this, but this class has been a masterclass in frustration more than learning how to use DSpace, ePrints and Omeka. I'm hoping that if I get the internship at Bancroft Library or Internet Archive, I will work with at least one person who can help me get familiar with a bibliographic database application the way say, Mr. Prestazog helped me learn so much about Blue Marble and other GIS applications as well as software and computer graphics in general over 12 years ago, just by making himself available to answer my questions. I don't really think any other pedagogical method has been helpful. Attempting to learn how to work with these applications via querying bulletin boards has been with very few exceptions, fruitless for me.

Unit 10 cataloging my collection

With my collection, I have mostly used keywords and have also used tags. With tags, I guess there is a certain kind of democracy that could exist in that tags that are kind of outliers will be shown to be exactly that while tags that are more useful or popular or "correct" will get used or clicked or otherwise utilized. I guess with these exercises, since the person who put the collection together is also doing the cataloging, it's much easier and clearer to express what I want to show. If it were a cataloger who didn't know the creator of the content, there there is a huge semantic game the cataloger must do, attempting to interpret what the object's creator had in mind, which is generaly pretty straight forward regarding that object's primary subject but can get bogged down with additional topics. When it comes to classification, I have come to understand that many books I have enjoyed were not classified by what I perceived the primary topic to be. A case in point was a book about an attempted coup d'etat in America called The Plot Against the White House is classified under Dewey as a biography of Smedly Butler, the man who quashed the plot, there are many other examples I've found, even as exercises for SIRLS classes in the past two semesters. 

Also my objects are pretty straightforward, an image of a person who died long before photography was around or an architectural reconstruction of a place as it stood thousands of years ago.  The complexity gets in classifying the medium the image is in: coin portraits, marble sculptures, encaustic paintings.

I appreciate Drupal's comments area where I can attempt to elaborate with further text: "This is a bust of the boy emperor, Elagabalus. This is the so-called second portrait style, in a cuirass to emphasize his military prowess and identiy him with his military supporters." That is not exactly information you can store in the Dublin Core. With Eprints, I wasn't able to add any of this, it seemed there were only a few areas where I could add text. Eprints seems to have a cataloging feature structured on Library of Congress classification several of the subjects of my portraits have their own listings in LoC, but Eprints seems uncooperative.

Unit 09 EPrints

EPrints was about as much a pain in the neck as Drupal but less so than DSpace. The degree of frustration I have felt with these past two repositories has really made me reconsider my career choice and academic choices. Drupal was difficult, but I got through with help from a helpful guy at UITS who was actually not working on something they cover but had a high degree of empathy and intellectual curiosity. DSpace was probably the most frustrating technology challenge I have tackled and failed since I first starting taking classes in technology some 19 years ago. I failed with DSpace, UITS could not help me, even a friend of a friend who is an IT professional got me about 80-95% the way there, but we were never able to get Tomcat fired up. I really love when I can make digital projects and impress people with them, but alas, it is just not happening with me and DSpace.
Currently I have a student from this class in my only face-to-face class, (the hideous Research Methods) and she was commiserating with me about 675 versus 672 and she stated that in 672 all her projects went live but with this class, not so much. It was some degree of comfort and/or consolation, but I would much prefer to actually get these repositories to function and learn how to play around with them instead of be comforted.
In another huge breakthrough in my life, my wife presented her public dissertation this past Friday, a huge milestone in her career as a medical anthropologist. This also means she will be able to take over some of the time I have been using in watching our child this semester, so I will have loads more time. It is clear to me if I am going to do well for the remainder of this class I'm going to waive my "no more all-nighters" rule I put into effect one I became a full time SIRLS student.
In other news, I'm looking into applying for an internship in a nifty digital library position at a major university back in my native neck of the woods. Should that one fall through, there's San Francisco Public Library's document digitization project as an internship, but I've been doing that kind of work for some time.

Unit 8 Approaching doneness

Had a four hour session with an IT guy to finally break the back of the DSpace impasse. We did not get it done before I had to split off and work at the health sci library.We have Tomcat installed but it won't run yet. I will restart my VM tomorrow and try to figure out if I can get it up and running, otherwise my IT buddy will help conclude things on Tuesday followed by me initiating DSpace, adding the appropriate new modules and updating posts and posting screenshots in Dropbox this week, 'cuz I won't be making it to TJ or Ft. Lauderdale ~no none of that kinda stuff while I watch my daughter to enable to wife to finish off the dissertation. I'll have a lot more free time once she's accomplished that feat. Unfortunately she'll have her Ph.D. done in time for summer break...

Unit 7 Interesting projects in DSpace
The DuraSpace support site is amazing! There are projects there that look great and seem useful and functional. I liked that DSpace seems to support really graphically rich collections like the Ohio State and the UI for the Internet Archive page turner and image gallery (with completely functional thumbnails, much better than ANYTHING at the AZ Memory Project) as well as handling traditional repository of articles-style collection I'm more familiar with these days. The latter is seen in the SUNScholar Repository themed UI. I would really like to get something like that Ohio State UI Image Gallery set up to show off my collection.
So currently I am stalled at trying to get the successful build with Tomcat, I am tempted to just create yet another VM from scratch to insure that I select the right setting for the Tomcat Java server set up. If I can't get this cracked tonight I'm going to get help at UITS. Again my inability to "see" my directories is a problem.

Could I be getting the hang of things?

Still plugging away at getting Dspace installed and configured.
I guess I am getting the hang of installing virtual machines, so I've got that going for me. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out where things transferred from what is covered in the ever useful Standard Installation Guide to the part where we begin configuring for Tomcat instead of Apache and Postgresql (I got used to typing that). Again the instructions kind of gave me a feel for what we were trying to do here but I still don't have Dspace installed and configured. The content I saw from METEA was really inspiring, so I am motivated to get this done.
Oh yeah, this week I learned that if you hit the down arrow key you can bring up previous commands so you don't have to retype stuff. Is this a laptop or PC/Windows thing? How much of my life did I waste retyping commands before I learned that?
But yeah typo traps there have been...