Unit 9: Consistency

In my experience, creating the catalog or metadata record for digital objects take the longest of any steps in the digitization process and as result winds up being the most expensive part. Enforcing consistency during the process is also challenging. In the past, I have relied heavily on detailed manuals describing each metadata field and providing specific examples to try to maintain some level of consistency. Consistency is easier to achieve when the person creating the metadata record has to make a simple, black and white judgement that can be clearly explained in a manual. It is much harder to achieve when dealing with subjective description, such as assigning controlled vocabulary. Particularly if you have more than one person working on a project, it is unrealistic to expect perfect consistency. I have had some success with identifying records that are inconsistent, and then sitting down periodically with staff and talking through the differences and their individual thought processes to try and get everyone on as close to the same page as possible. It is a time consuming process which adds to the project length and expense. In the case of this project, it is somewhat easier since only one person is doing all the cataloging. It is surprising, however, how inconsistent even the same person can be from day to day. I think the different installations we are doing and re-cataloging in a sense of the digital objects in our collections is helping to expose the inconsistencies so by the time we complete our final projects the consistency level of our description should be rather high. That is not really a plausible tactic in large scale though, unless you are using sampling methods.

Unit 8: Continued

So, my experience installing and configuring EPrints has not improved. It took me creating 4 virtual machines and attempting to install EPrints 5 times before it worked. I am not even sure if the one thing I did differently actually made it work or if it was just a fluke. I basically just edited the sources file in steps rather than uncommenting the two lines and adding the two new lines all at once, and ran the update and safe-upgrade commands twice after each change. Other than that, I didn't change a single step. Now thanks to EPrints problems, I am behind in classwork for the first time this semester which will adversely effect my grade. I am not sure I can manage to not hold all the aggravation of the last week or so and that against the software to judge it objectively at this point...

Unit 8: Stay Tuned

Well, for the first time ever I have not been able to get a repository up and running. Sadly, I keep getting the same "unknown id" error and can't even get past the very first part of configuring EPrints. I have started over completely from scratch, created a second new virtual machine and reinstalled everything and am still getting the same error. I don't understand what I am doing wrong. It is really frustrating, especially compared to the relatively painless installs of Drupal and DSpace. I hate that I am stuck and can't move any further. Sigh...stay tuned for a hopefully happy ending!

Unit 7: DSpace Community

Since our blog assignment this week was flexible and there was no direction for how to report back on our research into the DSpace community, I thought this would be a good place to talk about my findings for Assignment 1b. Essentially, I found the DSpace community to be quite substantial. There are currently 1136 registered users of the software, and I am sure if it is anything like other open source software communities that there are a large number of non-registered users out there. A few quick searches turns up significant amounts of thorough documentation, training modules, user group meetings and mailing lists, blogs and wikis. In addition to the documentation and introductions to DSpace covered in our assignments last week, I also like http://www.dspace.org/training-grid/configurable-submission-system-for-dspace.html. There is also the monthly publication NewSpace and the DSpace Global Outreach Committee to help stay connected. And then there's DSpace's proven staying power, as well as even more importantly perhaps for some several service providers available to assist with implementations for institutions lacking the necessary IT support. All in all if I were ranking user community as one of the evaluation criteria for a system, I would give DSpace a top rating in that category.

Unit 6: DSpace Install

The install of DSpace actually went pretty smoothly. I had a problem early on with the connection which preventing me from running the aptitude commands, but that was just because I didn't realize based on the instructions that we had to put the system in bridged mode for the static IP address to work properly. After I sorted that issue out with Professor Fulton's help, everything was fine. I think understood the gist of the instructions and individual commands, i.e. it made overall sense what I was trying to accomplish. I still find that I am mainly demonstrating my ability to carefully follow instructions and pay attention to detail sometimes rather than fully comprehending what I am typing. In the "real world" though, I suspect that is frequently the position archival professionals are placed in, especially if working at institutions without adequate IT support. What matters is that it worked! The other two examples of instructions look different but familiar at the same time. It is not surprising to me that installations can be approached from slightly different ways. The overall components of the installs looked similar if in slightly different orders. They weren't as helpful as Professor Fulton's videos mainly because they lack the audio commentary patiently talking you through all the steps and what to expect next, but they still looked fairly simple and straightforward. I think it is important to remember that we are not alone and there is no need to reinvent the wheel. There are user communities and lots of resources out there to turn to for help in installing this kind of content management system, assuming of course that you have some basic IT infrastructure in place to begin with. I think this is something I could do on my own in a basic deafult sort of way. As I have learned from working with alot of different software systems, its when you want to get into customization or advanced functionality that the assistance of a systems specialist is usually needed.