Unit 5 Update!

After Prof. Fulton posted a revised set of instructions, I had no problem downloading and installing tinyMCE and the WYSIWYG feature. I have added the capability of readers' comments and an ability to readers to post images. The date module was a lot harder, though. I still haven't figured out how to activate the "Date API" but I have had to move on to get started with the DSPace project. Overall, I think I am finally starting to comprehend the spoon fed Linux we have been using. I am now beginning to get the vocabulary but not so much the syntax of Linux, i.e. I am starting to understand the commands we give but if I were required to write my own commands, I would need to heavily rely on commands we have given in the past and I'd need to use trial and error to see if my modifications would work. So, gee, I think I only need to work on LAMP tech for another year and a half to six or seven years straight before this stuff sinks in.

Unit 5:

404'd to the Floor
Although I have seen there's been a fix regarding the URL to get the Drupal modules, I will give those a shot later today. Of the modules we are assigned to add to our Drupal site the date module seems the most common and Views seems to be a fundamental module to keeping one's site organized. Drupal is a really powerful solution for creating automated and templated web pages, but I've got to successfully download all the modules in order to make them work.  Considering the limited scope of this exercise Drupal might even be overkill, but if I can get all my features in my collection up and running as a proof of concept, then this project might actually be useful to me once this class is wrapped up. However I needed to post something here on my blog despite having not completed the work.

I'm going to finish up the discussion on the Europeana project (which I started in my downtime at AHSL yesterday) and swing back to try to nail down the Drupal stuff. I like to consider the Tech assignments as practice and the management portions as theory, but I like to get them done discretely, however I can't just open up my laptop and start plugging away at the information desk, not as cleverly as reading stuff on their computer screen.

Unit 4 On the suitability of Drupal

So far Drupal really only seems to be working for me when I'm here in the UITS lab on Saturday night, in fact here on Valentine's Night when I should be cozying up to my spouse. So, when I initially got working on Drupal I was relieved with its completely GUI environment, thank you Hey-Zeus! I just need to be able to replicate my awesome skillz while I am anywhere else. Last night I was able to do a lot of work while at AHSL (same UA Wifi I assume?) But once my computer forcibly shut down to install some crappy updates, I was unable to access my Drupal work leading to me being completely infuriated. Like 672 last semester, I have a feeling this class will profoundly influence my mental and emotional wellbeing on any given week. Okay, I looooove using Drupal and have dealt with folks who were huge Drupal fans 5-6 years ago when I as helping to develop content for the Stealth Health Project. Drupal is great when i can actually work on it, I friggin' have nothing but utter hatred for it when I cannot access the work I did just last night. But I like the options given by Drupal and reading that PowerPoint that was done by those OCLC guys it seems like a great CMS especially given the price point.

Unit 3 On the pacing of the Tech Assignments

I am okay with the current pace of the tech assignments. Last semester I had a tough time with a few of them and got the feeling that a lot of information was stuffed into too few weeks, especially once we came to the PHP section.
Hoo boy last semester...
I think that the combination of the management assignments with the more practical tech assignments are a powerful 1-2 punch of tech learning uh of course a 1-2 punch is a very different thing when you're on the receiving end of it, which following this analogy through, I guess I am. I also have to say there's something a little bit reassuring in the way that Prof. Fulton's voice comes across in the written instructions, I mean Prof. Fulton is not the warmest and fuzziest of guys (he does play a mean blues guitar, howevs although what kind of ax that was he was playing on that Youtube video is beyond me), but he is still human and incredibly knowledgeable on this topic. Plus who would want a warm fuzzy instructor in a graduate level technology-heavy course?

Unit 2 Developing a Library CMS in Minnesota

“LibData to LibCMS: One library's evolutionary pathway to a content management system” 

(doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/07378830610652086) records the effort put in by a team of librarians at University of Minnesota to port their content from a data repository over to a more active content management system (CMS).

U MN librarians looked into the advantages and disadvantages of using a CMS. This part of the article explains that the library team considered other options in light of thoughts that they should proceed cautiously and not just jump on any CMS bandwagon. They also carefully considered creating their own CMS from scratch or buying a commercially made version from a vendor. They realized that by creating their own CMS they would have control over source code, they would have no proprietary issues and they could tailor the system to their needs as a group of university libraries.

Subsequently the team developed an analysis of the requirements of the CMS, this was a terse, stripped down list of core functions. Clearly institutional experience in their last project, which resulted in a specification document with over 300 items, tempered and disciplined their new requirements to a sparse but seemingly authoritative eight points or demands for minimal requirements.

At one point in the article, Bramscher points out that the CMS would be used to handle special content, including:

Records in databases, singly or in sets. These produce point‐of‐query algorithmic or computed content. They may be instantiated in the form of search results based on permuted user selections. They do not exist as assembled content until an end‐user creates a set of conditions such that they congeal.

Despite that last gelatinous analogy, I like that part as it succinctly states what a CMS does and how it acts with the databases, in this case the LibData, which provide content for the web pages put together using the templates created in the CMS. These webpages are created solely as a result of choices made by the user.

The article also details the tradeoffs between “content,” “management,” and “system” and the inherent tensions and tradeoffs that are assumed in automating these three areas.

The remainder of the paper reviews how the completed CMS finally performed once completed. LibCMS had a great and simple navigation system of breadcrumbs this class not being focused on HCI, I won’t go into it here, suffice it to say it is both simple as well as completely. LibCMS utilized widgets to provide dynamism in page generation (I don’t know what advantages that offers). Being a CMS for a research library, LibCMS developed a manner of handling foreign characters to smooth out problems from one character set to another, a recurring headache especially in disparately created collections of databases.

Overall this paper dealt mostly with managerial matters in choosing to buy or create a proprietary CMS for a library system and what might be a good set of requirements for developing one. I guess before I started in DigIn, I was not as interested in management perspectives, but this paper helped me understand what goals needed to be met by creating and running a CMS for a consortium of state university libraries.

675 unit 1

My collection is going to be from an image library I have created for a project that is not academic in nature, however it falls into the domain of  two previous academic disciplines I have been involved with: Politics (BA UC Santa Cruz 1993) and Graphic Design (AA Platt College 1998). So this is for a web comic that is history-based on ancient history. So far I've drawn 132 pages of this thing (about a quarter of the whole project I have outlined), of course this is done when I'm not filling my time with grad school, working, parenting and sleeping. To illustrate the ancient world, you need to know what people looked like, what they wore, where they lived and what they did and you need to draw them all convincingly. There is a great deal of archeological and artistic evidence out there, it's just a matter of knowing EVERYTHING and creating a  database of visual reference. My real visual reference has about 50 directories and each of those have about ten items on average, so there's a lot of content I could deal with. I'll try to keep it to the suggested 15 items.

I have a lot of jpegs, I also have some text files including character briefs and descriptions of historic events taken from primary and secondary sources, but mostly jpegs. I am realizing I have some ancient music, maybe eventually I could embed music into my final product? I'll see what I can do about managing some MP3s, but I'm feeling they will be strictly an option.

Unit 14: Busy to the last possible minute

Although some folks had attributed a problem with running PHP script prepared in TextEdit, I switched to GEdit, which comes with the software suite in Ubuntu and I still had no luck. I was aware that TextEdit had a nasty habit of adding the ".rtf" extension to all files, but such was not the case with GEdit. I have no idea where I've gone wrong. All of this material is stuff I wanted to master and I would be satisfied even if I didn't master it so long as I could get things to run and I had a pretty good run of "luck" or "ability to follow *some* instructions" before hitting the PHP section. I do have a couple weeks over break to review everything and attempt to do the LAMP part over on my Dell laptop, running Windows. They always say that the importance of an experiment is the ability to replicate it. I will be the first to admit that there were several times this semester where I think I finally got stuff to work on a fluke. Looking back at the form of documentation I created in terms of screenshots, there were a lot of shots done when I was going well and few when I came up against challenges. I have indeed taken steps to get away from earlier, long held reactions of getting emotional when I ought to double down on being rational. The topic I would most like to explore is where on earth did I go wrong with this PHP stuff? What is it about this particular script (I have never seen before) that made it such a problem?
Still, I feel like I went far in actually using Linux, opening directories, apt-getting applications and running them, navigating with some degree of dexterity I have never had. Now on to the final and off to work.