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.