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.
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