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.