Week 4

The positives for Drupal content management of the webcomic collection I am developing is based on two points. 1.) the levels of permissions the role function allows gives a lot of control over the collection and 2) it is scalable to size and purpose of the community of users. As I envision this collection as a test for a more informal community based project and not one that is necessarily embedded or part of the workflow of large scale projects amongst professional information managers. For the amateur enthusisiasts as it were, interested in discoverability and preservation. Or the smallish public library, adding patron created content for fun. In which case a distinct advantage of Drupal is that it allows different users different access levels in a flexible way. The pyramid shape of access from the many anonymous users at the bottom to the (very) few administrators at the top give real control over managing the content input and searchability. The negative side of that coin is that the administrators truly need to know what they are doing and the initial setup needs to be very good or problems will appear quickly and escalate. While Drupal offers good documentation and support the administrator would need to be an expert. Since the webcomic community is, in general, not financially stable, this would most likely be volunteer labor which carries its own concerns. This is why the scalability of Drupal is useful, as community created resources often have a growth period. One success criteria element I am curious about is the best methods of communication for such a project. In the open source world a forum will grow to dominate the community and form a common area that is a successful way to ensure communication occurs in a timely manner. For the webcomic community, there is not currently a dominant website that fulfills that function. If this collection project were to be a success it may evolve into that dominant site and it at this point it is not clear to me how well Drupal will do with forum tasks. Other criteria points to investigate would be security, preservation support , and methods for avoiding redundancies. I have no doubt more criteria points will develop with further experience.