Unit 12

Using a pre-installed VM presents different challenges than creating one directly around the planned digital collections. The biggest factor for which would be preferred would be the culture of knowledge fostered and the support (or lack thereof) from administration. I believe building one would be preferable in terms of a the robustness of the repository. However, if there is not a shared sense of commitment and understanding between shareholders, particularly those that decide policy and funding, it may prove to be too big a bite to try. In particular, preservation issues must be thoroughly addressed and I can see the logic of using a pre-configured set-up if doubts for long-term funding were present. It is hard to say in some ways because I am learning this in an isolated environment in a way and in the real-world more people and opinions would impact things a great deal. As far as pre-configuration helping to give more time to devote directly to the collection is a valid argument but the counter would be that pre-planning should/could do the same on a self-generated system.

unit 11

Perhaps because it is the freshest memory or maybe I have had more experience with evaluating websites in this field, but I was impressed with the Omeka site. In part I felt it was nicely geared for the beginner with both screencast and text based documentation. There was a logical set-up to the site and I felt the general overview was complete. One negative was that the FAQ page was deleted and had not been replaced for over a year. I particularly liked the Use Cases forum, in which developers explained how they used Omeka in different real life institutions. This gave me both insight into how to use Omeka but also a more general sense of what other types of people want to develop digital collections beyond libraries, archives and museums.

Drupal is aesthetically a little fussy for me but the documentation was significantly more detailed on the technical side than Omeka. It is also clearly much more popular and has been around longer which means its background information and forums have tackled more problems and offer more solutions. Drupal and Dspace home sites have a lot in common in terms of numerous links, depth of documentation and general sense of being overly full. An example from Dspace is the feature of linking ‘child pages’ to each main section. There are reasons why this would be helpful to follow a topic throughout the website but it adds on numerous links to the page that is unnecessary/confusing for the general user.

Jhove strikes a balance between the bustling atmosphere of Drupal and Dspace compared to the cleaner Omeka. It is clearly focused for IT staff. A concern is that some of the information is a little old. An example being that the news link has only two links, both from 2008. Has nothing happened in two years or is no one managing the website? Neither inspire a sense of confidence.

The OAI-PMH main site is deep and shows that the project has history and is a major international endeavor. It is a little impersonal and expects a certain amount of previous knowledge from its users on things like acronymns. My experience was positive with the install process but the website itself is a little intimidating.

One of the key features of all these systems is that they are open source based. To me this means the sense of community, communication and forum options, documentation and current news would be very important considerations in the choosing process. I like Omeka but the appeal of Dspace or Drupal is the large and active community of users that could provide support for free. It is a balancing act and I would give a lot of consideration to future support before making commitments.

Unit 10

It is an interesting question to determine how successful a service provider of harvested metadata is as we are entirely dependent on their efforts for our results. Without the service providers, the information does not get found easily. Which makes it curious to me that the service providers I was able to examine were rather a mix of strange bedfellows.

Ex. 1. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/search?redirect=true

The collections that provide the sources are disparate to say the least. The dominant collection is on the Art and Artifacts of Greek and RomanMaterials, while the second largest contributor is a collection of 19^th century American history, including the digital archive of the Richmond Times Dispatch newspaper. Subject, time period, place, etc. are not held in common and when searching the two faces of the collection are very apparent. What I am assuming is that it is a collection that the host, Tufts University, is finding this a convenience for its own reasons but it is not logical combination for the general user.

Ex. 2 http://re.cs.uct.ac.za/

This was a different style of searching than the norm. What the site does (from its frankly hideous looking interface) is allows you to set metadata parameters that you can then apply to the OAI compliant providers listed. There is not a way to search by key words and it requires knowledge of how OAI harvesting works to make sense. Again the collection of providers is from all sorts of institutions, around the world and with little obviously in common. It is kind of an inside out search tool. Another confusing point, the Open Archives list shows Virginia Tech as the host, but the site itself is from the University of Cape Town. Bit of a difference between the two!

Ex. 3 http://hispana.mcu.es/es/estaticos/contenido.cmd?pagina=estaticos/presentacion

By far the most successful of the examples was the Hispana site in terms of relevancy of search results. In large part this is due to the fact that it is a dual project with one side a directory of digital projects from Spain and the other a harvester for those same projects. This two in one approach meant that searches for common terms gave relevant results. The limitation is that it is all related to Spain. However, I would prefer to go to more than one service provider and get relevant results if they are both like the Hispana site rather than go to the Perseus site and have an unusable mix.