IRLS 675 Final Blog

This course provided opportunities to build  repositories and practice working within those environments. The four open source content management systems we worked with were dissimilar enough to practice different skills, yet parallel enough to have a continuity of learning.


Drupal was a robust platform, and offered much more than just the ability to develop a repository. At this particular time in my learning curve most of its features, like running intranets, portals and blogs, and managing websites was lost on me. I felt like I only scratched the surface during the practice time using it. My end impression was that it was flexible to use as a repository, but not the best choice for one. I did not like the way items and metadata were presented in a blog-like display, but this might have been overcome with a more in-depth exploration.

This was my second opportunity to use DSpace, the first was IRLS 671--Introduction to Digital Collections. The workflow was easier the second time, but I must admit my dislike of the interface that organized everything into communities. One repository I evaluated had close to 100 communities listed on their welcoming page, which was not welcoming at all to an end-user unfamiliar with the university’s administrative structure.

EPrints strength lay in its ability to archive and distribute scholarly publications. It was designed perfectly for that purpose, and was flexible enough to accommodate my collection of images. However its academic environment was a poor match for the touristy feel of my collection of photographs.

I especially liked Omeka, and felt it has a lot to offer. As opposed to the other three, I think its ability to host a collection in the clouds (for a fee, of course) is a positive feature that i might be able to use later.

I think one of the most important outcomes of this class for me was a better understanding of metadata; working with application profiles, ontologies and taxonomies. Overall I learned a lot about working with repository platforms and am looking forward to applying what I have learned.

Unit 12

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, I think we are only scratching the surface when it comes to understanding the workings of a repository. Realistically that’s about the best that a semester or two can do—the actual experiences of working day-to-day with digital collections (hopefully) will provide the depth of understanding needed for competency and productivity. So when questioned which should be considered for future classes, the continuation of a semester of quick forays into the installation and configuration of four different virtual machines, or a pre-configured VM, I would have to say I’m split evenly between the two choices.


On one hand, things have started to come together this semester during the CLI parts of the class. In IRLS 672 I blindly copied code like a transcriptionist reproducing a manuscript in a foreign language. Now as I type, I’m beginning to get a sense of what I’m actually trying to do. Unfortunately if something goes wrong all I can do is compare and look for typos—it will take many more courses before I can suggest to myself an alternative way of coding. But that’s the progression in learning.

On the other hand, since I have many obligations in my life beside this class (family and work are two) something has had to suffer. I have spent hours and hours staring at code that wasn’t working the way it should have. That time could have been used for a better purpose working with a collection in a pre-configured VM, and I would probably know more about managing digital collections.

I don’t know if it’s logistically possible, but perhaps a compromise would work. Rather than developing four virtual machines from the ground up (Drupal, DSpace, ePrints and Omeka), why not select two and use the remaining time working with a collection in depth in a pre-configured virtual machine? From my perspective Drupal and Omeka were the least like each other, and also offered unique learning experiences that could apply to other platforms used for repositories today. And learning to apply ontologies, metadata, crosswalks, several plugins, etc, in one environment, but more in-depth and consistently, might serve us learners better.

Unit 11 Comparison of Home Sites

I’m not quite sure if this week’s blog assignment is to discuss the home site of the repository we were created using Drupal, DSpace, ePrints and Omeka, or the respective organizations’ home site.


Of the organizations’ home sites, I must admit I found Drupal’s marketing line the most compelling: Come for the software, stay for the community. It emphasizes that a novice repository developer would not be alone, but has a great deal of global support. Let’s make that an exceptional amount of company and support: “701,691 people in 228 countries* speaking 181 languages power Drupal.”

DSpace and ePrints, on the other hand seem to stress the fact that they are open-access, while Omeka labels itself a platform for “serious” web publishing. By having such terms prominently displayed on the homepage such as “Dublin Core,” “Linux,” “Apache,” “MySQL,” and “PHP” it is skipping the amateur website developer and marketing to users with a substantial bit of IT/Digital Content background.

All sites appeared as the top result when Googled, all sites were “busy” and required a lot of scrutiny to find the sections of interest. I would not determine a final selection for repository software by the home page of the platform. I am much more interested in how I can use it, rather than how the organization has chosen to use it—our needs and user base are probably much different.

Harvesting

It was a strange day in computerland. Although there is no logic to support it, I often find on rainy days that the Internet does not behave like one thinks it should. And south Florida has been in the midst of a very rainy weekend.

According to a long summary on the Open Archives Service Providers site, the stated purpose of Scientific Commons is to create relationships between authors and publications, and it has already done so for 23 million. I was quickly taken to a webpage with a banner saying “Scientific Commons, ” a search box, the option to view the page in either German or English and a list of “Neue Publikationen.” I tried to switch to the English version (which did not happen). I put the search term “climate change” into the search box anyway and waited and waited and waited. Nothing happened. I tried to open some of the “neue publikationens” listed on the homepage, including several with English abstracts. Nothing happened.

The site is deceptively friendly looking for English speakers. I’m not one who believes the entire global community needs to translate everything into English to suit me because English is the language I speak. I know that English in the common language of the scientific community, and that many times only an abstract will be written in English. But I was surprised that nothing opened even when clicking on the links to German articles. It makes it very difficult to review without the ability to see any results, but the bottom line is that the site does not function well, at least on this side of the Atlantic.

The link from Open Archives Service Providers for Callima.org went to a website for addiction, and I didn’t notice anything that looked remotely like a collection of metadata. DigitAlexandria looked promising and impressive on their homepage. About 1,000,000 documents were in their system, with some of the best scientific research centers listed as harvested. The only trouble is that putting a term in the query box and searching resulted in a page opening which had a logo for the Wayback Machine (Beta) and a error message which read: Page cannot be crawled or displayed due to robots.txt. Bizarre.

I finally decided to check Scirus, which I have used before. Mercifully it opened to its familiar search page. It bills itself as a specialty search engine which concentrates on scientific websites. Its “Preferred” websites include; Digital Archives, NDLTD, RePEc, DiVa and multiple Patent Offices. It also iharvests several prominent publishers like Elsevier, Royal Society Publishing, Wiley-Blackwell and Sage. There should be no confusion that these records will lead to the full text; only the metadata records have been harvested with a note linking to the publishers website. Overall I have found Scirus very useful when searching the web for scientific information. Because it searches scientist’s websites and they frequently have links to PowerPoints of their presentations, I have often found graphic-rich material to show students when they are looking for illustrations for their own projects. And today it worked as expected.

Uniit 9

There is such a learning curve creating metadata for my collection. I do not have any background in cataloging other than a mandatory course taken early in grad school. As I work more with the process I am discovering inconsistencies in the items that I create metadata for. I like to think that I am learning as I go, but I realize that I have such a long way to go. I have read over the elements list in Dublin Core and IEEE Learning Objects Metadata. What seems simple at first glance becomes difficult when trying to apply the rules and inexperience gets in the way.


I recently took a workshop on Metadata for ContentDM; I was the only non-technical services person who attended. During discussions and breakout session I could sense the importance to the catalogers for precision, almost to the point of obsession. I am not gifted in that way.

Working as a reference librarian I can appreciate the work that catalogers do. I often feel frustrated by the lack of precision I experience when searching proprietary databases. It seems that in a move to become more Google-like many database providers are attempting to liberally interpret subject terms; so many times lately I will look at a list of results and wonder how a certain item could possiblely be relevant.

Unit 8 ePrints

I found the degree of difficulty between the installation of ePrints, Drupal and DSpace about the same. However I do think configuration of ePrints, and its customization was more complex and needlessly difficult.


I added to the Welcome message (which wasn’t difficult), and added a logo (which took three unsuccessful tries with method 1, and two tries, ultimately successful, with method 2). I tried to change the theme, although I could not see any differences between glass and green. It also took several hours to get the changes made to the subject taxonomy, but that is probably due to my inexperience in CLI.

It is rather disappointing that there are such few options for customization within ePrints. I credit Drupal with much greater choices for themes and modules. Overall ePrints seemed to have a lack of community support when compared to Drupal and DSapce, although there is plenty of documentation available on their site.

According to Wikipedia, this platform was originally created for institutional repositories and for scientific journals. Its history is tied to the development of the OAI-PMH protocol, and was one of the first open source, free software packages. My ultimate conclusion is that it is very suitable if using it for the purpose it was created—an IR or journal publishing. It however would be my second, or third choice as a repository for other item types.

Unit 7 Sticker Shock

I work for a community college, not a major research university that demands high tuition from its students, but an institution that is trying to provide an “affordable” education to students who otherwise wouldn’t be able to attend college at all. The faculty’s emphasis is on teaching rather than research, so a digital collection that makes the most sense for us is to have is a learning object repository. I have begun to investigate what is available  in software platforms for a LOR, and in the past two weeks I have spoken to two commercial providers.

The first company I contacted was Equella. It runs the state’s learning object repository, Orange Grove, and appeared very suitable for what my campus would like to do. At present, we have no learning objects, just the dream of creating them. The campus has approximately 10,000 students and, if things take off, the repository would hopefully expand to include the three other campuses in our college system. As I talked to the representative, it became clear that Equella is not scalable down, but is a complete content management system, able to integrate the library management systems, student registration, provide a repository and multiple other things. After a one-time installation ($125,000) and consultation fees ($25,000), the yearly license would be approximately $80,000 a year. Suspicious because Equella is part of the Pearson publishing company, it seemed exorbitant to me.

So I read some other reviews and came across Telescope from North Plains. It advertises itself as scalable and affordable, with an emphasis on digital assets management (DAM) specifically of video and audio files. Speaking with a very nice representative who admitted that funding is often a problem with educational institutions, he was able to lower the yearly license fee down to $100,000 a year. (Gasp) Or we could purchase the software ($150,000), store all files on our own server, and pay a yearly maintenance fee of $30,000 a year. (What a bargain).

I guess I’m naïve; I don’t have much experience with budgets. I really don’t have anything to compare these prices to but our annual book budget of $50,000. But suddenly the open source products—DSpace, Drupal and others we will be looking at in this course are looking very attractive from a financial perspective.

Unit 6

I was intimidated as I began the installation of DSpace. This was mainly because I had started by reading all the discussion posts in the Tech Activity section of D2L, and it looked as if many people were having installation problems.

The first problem I encountered took me a full day to conquer, and even then it was not the resolution of the problem but a work around. I still do not understand why the second VM would not connect with the same fixed IP address as the first VM. But at least I was able to get DSpace configured using a bridged mode.

During the actually configuration I began to get a sense of what I was doing—not all the time, but enough to feel that I was not just transcribing code from one form to another. I also felt this way last week while adding a new module to Drupal and reformatted previous code to install the new module. This is such a beginning step--I know that for any major undertaking I would be very dependent on a system specialist. But I do feel now that the CLI is not an enemy, I even am beginning to enjoy working with it.

I am grateful to Bruce’s attention to detail when writing our tech assignments. Little notes like “put your host’s name in the brackets” and “there is a space after x” are what this beginner needs.

I looked at the two other installation instructions at SUNScholar and DSpace. I felt as the one from SUNScholar assumed that the audience was an advanced programmer who just needed a quick review on the directions. the instructions at DSpace seemed a little friendlier. I particularly liked that those instructions called for TOMCAT and PostgreSQL to be installed during the installation of Ubuntu. Every little bit helps.

Unit 5

I had originally tried to download Google Analytics, which I have heard much about but never worked with. I was unsuccessful, using the same code for the other modules on the assignment sheet: wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/google_analytics-6.x-3.3.tar.gz. I kept getting an error message—page not found, and gave up—probably too easily. So I chose Gallery Assist, a module which promised to be simple, fast, uncomplicated and successful, which it was. When I previewed it before downloading, I liked the way it displayed photos—with and without text, and various screen sizes and display options. Since my collection is photographs, the display of them is very important, and I like having several thumbnails in a gallery to tease the viewer with. In ContentDM, there is an option to display items on the landing page in a revolving carousel. This is not appropriate for all items such as PDFs and some thumbnails which just say “item” or the file type. But it can be very attractive with images. I’m not sure if Gallery Assist can do anything that advanced, because I only tired some simple configurations. Although the video demonstrating installation and configuration was definitely not high quality, it was adequate to allow me to follow along and successfully create a gallery of photographs on my Drupal home page.

Drupal

Drupal is a good entry point for a novice to begin to create web content. Configuration of the site, adding  content and creating users has been relatively easy. But I am less than impressed with it for managing a repository of photographs.

I’m disappointed in the appearance of my Drupal collection.  I’m not talking about the lack of fancy graphics, colors or themes for the website, but the absence of the appearance of an organized structure to the repository. It’s true I have not spent a lot of time configuring it, so perhaps this is just an “out-of-the-box” experience.  But I don’t like the items in the collection to be displayed as posts. I don’t like that an image is not displayed until one clicks on it as an “attachment” -- this gives the impression that viewing the images is the secondary reason to come to the site. I don’t like that the information I entered for the record is not displayed with field names, but just as (meaningless) words in a semi-structured paragraph.  I don’t like that I cannot give an order to multiple words in the Subject field—they are listed in alphabetical order, not order of importance to the contents of the photograph. Probably in the hands of someone who was familiar with Drupal, all these negatives could be finessed into a beautiful, meaningful display, but not for a Drupal beginner like me with limited time to spend on each part of the assignment.  It is not surprising to me that a number of repositories (like AMP, IUPUI, University of Louisville and others) are using a commercial application such as ContentDM.

unit 3

The question for discussion for this week’s blog is whether the pace of the technical assignments is too fast, too slow, or just right. I wish I could say that they have been too slow (give me more?). And I can’t really say they are too fast—so far they have been nothing as intense as the assignments for IRLS 672. I also wish I could say that, due to all the skills I learned in the previous semester, I am finding them easier. But that’s not exactly it either. I have not yet encountered the absolutely stumping problems that frequently occurred during the summer session. But it is early yet, and I attribute this far more to luck than my new skill level. Perhaps I feel more confident during these assignments; I don’t seem to panic as quickly or as easily when something does go wrong—I just recheck for my work and move on.


In the syllabus for IRLS 672 Bruce said there was so much to learn, yet so little time. That sums up how I feel about the time factor and this class. Each thing we touch on could have a whole course devoted just to it. There is so much background on the topics that I could spend years gathering, so much depth of knowledge that cannot be attained in the time we have, so many skills that one practice session disallows for mastery.

It has been very difficult for me to find all the time needed for this class—I have a fulltime job, a long commute and family obligations. But I can’t condemn the pace of the assignments—I think it’s necessary to ensure we learn what will be needed.

Unit 2 Article Summary and Comments

Wiggins, R, Remley, J, & Klingler, T. (2006). Building a local CMS at Kent    State. Library Hi Tech, 24(2), doi: 10.1108/07378830610652121

This article describes the extensive undertaking by the Kent State University Libraries to recreate their website. After determining mandatory features desired in a new CMS and evaluating several commercial and open source products, the web team decided to create their own. Among the functionality they included were: metadata descriptions for every page, dynamic presentation of data, better site management tools to increase currency, and increased statistical and broken link reporting. The authors described their development and implementation plans, and provided examples of forms used during creation of specific pages.

My first though after reading this article was what a talented web team KSU Libraries had to complete this undertaking, how much insight they needed to develop a plan from a holistic level to the most detailed, and how lucky they were to pull it off without any major failures (at least that were reported.)

In the early 2000s, only a few years before this article was written, I was a member of a committee that redesigned our university library’s pages. At that time we were not concerned about dynamically created content or statistical reporting, but only concentrated on the look and feel of the static pages. Looking back, and comparing it to this article, our attempts were very naïve—little management of the site; form definitely took precedence over functionality. If I had reported on the process at the time, I would have had to tell of committee squabblings and discussions on whether icons should be clip-art or reality based. We also had usability testing, bribing students and staff with pizza, but were unable to offer any monetary compensation. (pizza must be the universal enticement at colleges). Only a year or so after the grand unveiling of the new, improved website, the university had a branding campaign, and all our work was scraped.


One idea that intrigued me, as a future enhancement for Kent’s system, was the possibility of faculty adding their own class pages as content resources. A very collaborative idea! I haven’t yet seen catalog tagging by users in any of the local systems I frequent, but perhaps tagging with links to a faculty’s content pages? As an instruction librarian I frequently recommend specific books and add them to a LibGuide created for a specific class assignment. Could a catalog result be cross-linked to a specific LibGuide to explore additional resources?

One thing that surprised me was Kent’s requirement for their CMS to only allow staff access to a WYSIWIG editor when creating content. I have been frustrated when using WYSIWIGS, and have been very grateful when I can open the html and see the coding. Maybe there are more perfect utilities that don’t get a mind of their own and add unwanted code, but in my limited experience I have found the html editing tool very valuable.


The article was a great introduction to the possibilities of the uses of a content management system beyond a storage and retrieval system.

On second thought…

I think a learning object repository is overly ambitious for the semester project. I am having trouble opening several of the files I saved in my home environment. JHOVE does not seem to be able to validate flash, and I am concerned that some of the repositories we test will not be able to display complex files.

So what’s a good second choice?

I have never been much of a collector. The only thing around my house which seems to collect is dust. I do, however, have a lot of pictures from the trips I’ve taken. So as cliché as this might be, I will be gathering some of my favorite digital photos of a trip to Peru, supplemented by a few notes from my husband’s travel journal, some audio files from a CD we purchased there, and maybe a travel video If I can find one to download on the net.

Unit 1 IRLS 675 Begins…

First assignment: gather together 15-20 digital objects. These will serve as the working collection for the repository systems we create in the coming weeks.

I immediately thought of a collection of learning objects. Learning objects are broadly defined as “any digital resource that can be reused to mediate learning.” (Wiley and Edwards, 2002) LOs are the big project my Provost is focusing on this semester, and I’ve been appointed to a committee to investigate what it would take to create a repository and to encourage faculty to begin creating VLOs for their distance learning courses. So collecting 15-20 learning objects to experiment with sounded great. In STEM topics—even more perfect!

Except…..

I spent a good portion of Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday trying to capture some objects. There are great repositories—Merlot, Wisc-Online, NSDL, Orange Grove, EcoLearnIt, etc. But Merlot and NSDL are decentralized (they point to objects rather than host them), Wisc asks that you link to their website instead of downloading items, and most of the other repositories did not have objects that I could easily download and use. (I have an entire folder full of zipped files—how do you put them in a repository?) I think I need a lot more technical skill (which I hope to get during this class.) I may be undertaking more than I can handle, but I would like to give this a try.

Tonight I came across some educational sites that were a little more promising. I have downloaded several .swf files, which I hope will work within the repositories we create. Although my initial attempt has been to try to find interactive flash files, as I hone the collection, I plan to include images, documents and other audio/visual formats.