Week 9

Ah, the metadata dilemma. Too much is too expensive while too little makes the whole project pointless since no one will find it. For digital libraries in general I think this is an area that is both art and science. For my digital collection in particular, the potential audience and known creators are who I have in mind when I am experimenting with cataloging. What I mean by that is I envision my collection of webcomics as being of popular culture interest and not for a specialized field or academia. For general users, who are comfortable online, traditional subject terms are not adequate as they can be old fashioned or non-intuitive. Because of that I have been playing mainly with key words and tags. Neither are perfect. Key words have potential as being natural language based and a well known search method. I think it is the system most users will be comfortable with. I personally like tagging as method of description but without high user involvement and/or collection density it doesn’t necessarily work well. In both cases, consistency is dependent on me (the administrator) paying attention and keeping track of what I had chosen in previous cases. The only way around this problem I can think of is to include decision making for terminology in the planning stages. And then hope one is prescient enough to cast the net wide enough to give full coverage.

Week8

While I have become quite cavalier about setting up a new VM, actually installing Eprints was more anxious. Each time we install a new system, there are new areas of confusion or grey spots in my previous understanding. I am however, taking the lesson from IRLS 673 to heart. At the beginning of that class command line work seemed beyond my understanding. And while I don't claim to understand it completely now, I have improved by magnitudes. I am believing the same will happen with time spent on Drupal, Dspace and now Eprints. Comparing the installation experiences between the three is apples to oranges to kiwi. I currently favor Drupal for my semester project in part because I was most comfortable with that installation. Dspace was a horrible experience, though to be fair most problems were externally generated. Eprints has been in between. The main issue with the install has been that it has taken more time, even though there have not been major problems. The aptitude upgrade and then the Eprints apt method both took a considerable amount of time for no reason I could deduce. It makes me fearful over my laptop and if the hardware doesn't work then that is a very big problem for me. As far as the configuration/branding exercise, when compared to the customization processes for Drupal and Dspace, I again would place it somewhere between the two. Drupal continues to be on top and Dspace in third. In non technical terms I am not feeling Eprints yet and part of it is that I don't have an example library that uses Eprints that I have really liked. The listing of the roar site of repositories using Eprints was large and the examples I looked at were interesting but nothing that inspired me. I have not spent as much time with Eprints as I have with the other two so I will be curious if my opinion changes at the end of these two weeks.

Week 7

I have had a week of discouragements in regards to DSpace installation as my late posts can attest. My beloved laptop has had sudden battery problems . The phone company has done a lot of repair work in my neighborhood after a big storm that has meant random internet blackout periods. And I am missing something about DSpace. Intellectually I understand the hierarchical nature of the DSpace setup but it is not a natural fit. When I try to apply those principles of organization to my digital collection it does not work well. I struggled to pick a collection at the beginning of the semester and still feel that it is not well formed. My conceptualization is not very firm as I don’t have any practical experience to draw off of. In previous posts I have been quite critical of dull or not very relevant collections being chosen for digital projects by institutions as being a cop-out. I still think that but I have new appreciation for the difficulties inherent in the process.

On more positive notes, the readings for Unit 7 were both very interesting. I appreciate the perspective the Stanford authors laid out as to the successes and failures of a major digital repository. It gave a new sense of the speed of change the digital reservation community is experiencing. The Johns reading about the context of repository software design gave insight into the root causes of differences between systems. The Greenstone open-source system is one I particularly find interesting because of its focus on multilingualism. The New Zealand Digital Library Project and the University of Waikato developed the project and a partnership with UNESCO has helped make it an international community. A phrase from the website has particular resonance regarding increasing the “awareness of the social implications of information technology”. This is brought home by the use of Greenstone for bilingual digital collections for minority languages at risk of extinction, as the New Zealand project has included Maori, there are others in Welsh, Kazakh, Hawaiian and more. It pleases me to see a digital library have two preservation roles to play. The Greenstone project also focuses on its interoperability with OAI-PMH and METS. It is also able to import and export collections with DSpace. How that works is something I will be interested in exploring further.

week 6

I had an unnervingly easy install of DSpace. I did not understand all the steps in the process but I did for a fair amount that means I would feel confident contributing to a discussion about DSpace but would not make decisions without a systems librarian. What is funny is that I had difficulties downloading the WRF for the tutorials that I am still trying to sort out. I was able to start the set up of the site as administrator and uploaded a collection piece but I will want to spend a lot more time experimenting before I make any final decisions about it being the best for my collection project.