subjective

I reprise the image of the mosaicked version of metadata to stand for my travails in cataloging my mosaics in various systems. Travails with…consistency. To sum up, I have

willingly adapted, melted and remolded, my headings to the strengths of the system in hand: Drupal, DSpace, EPrints. Each has had an adequate method for handling access to my collection…a very simple collection. I am hampered by a probable lack of imagination about my own collection, and by the fact that it is not as wide-ranging, yet, as I wish and hope. The artist self wants to track materials, costs, predominant colors…sales-minded. The…different self wants these original works to live alongside examples from all eras in all styles as a subject collection. Part self-archiving, part subject repository pulled from all over. To be brutally honest: I haven’t even been consistent in titling my works. Awful. Cataloger’s prerogative: not to be consistent when off the clock.

I would not have considered Library of Congress if EPrints had not offered it out of the box; and through misunderstanding, I stuck with LCSH longer than I might have in EPrints. I built a strange animal from the LC class NK, Decorative arts Applied arts Decoration and ornament, two additional levels deep (4 principal subheadings) purely to suit my materials. My impression of subject handling in Drupal and DSpace, somewhat muddied now but refreshed briefly by glancing again at those two VMs, is that they were both unsystematic, relying heavily on free keywords. EPrints invited me to think more broadly about my collection and toward the content I have not yet added. The two Ds encouraged my microvision, my focus on color, material name, and other very grounded details.

The truth revealed: metadata is/are better when the system prompts it/them better. EPrints required that I go to trouble if I wanted to dumb down my description, adding separate taxonomies; the other guys require going to some trouble to upload LCSH or another formal taxonomy/thesaurus (I believe it is possible in both). EPrints, in further truth, caused me to think harder about facets of my mosaic work though I did not, technically, have facets. I did make use of free text in addition to LCSH, but it was more riveting to try to tweak the LC levels.

The thought after the truth: know your subject and think big. Then find a system that thinks big ahead of you.

flavors of in between (for bits)

The current DLib article on DataStaR meshes with something we’re thinking about at my workplace. My topic is In Between Repositories (IBRs), where data bits may live, waiting, either forever or on their way to becoming something else. Granted DataStaR, and much IR work generally, emanates from scholarly need, need to share living work in stages, let work evolve groupwise; but really it’s all about beginning to use an IR as a memory stick. A little.

We’re embarking on a trial of an intentionally dark archive–a part of our institutional digital repository, up till now only for materials publicly described, that will take things fresh off the truck, electronic material (disks, CDs, DVDs, floppies…) we may not have appraised yet that needs someplace to live other than in a literal box. Accessioned, but not cataloged. Just dashed off into a form we know will be there when we, or they of the future, get to it.  We’ll park electronic files of potentially unknown content in this corner of the repository until we have time to sort them (and the rest of their associated collections) out. A dumping ground with a preservation angle. (Though I’m not entirely sure what the repository manager has agreed to. Migration?) Brings to mind the preservation track of IRs that we’ve been considering in school. It figures that shades of grey would begin to emerge in the business of digital holdings; once storage is cheap enough…no reason not to.

But a little concern about just starting technologically, which, even as I speak, we are, without really gaming this out. In a sense it’s no different than my usual practice of leaving the disks in place next to the folders in a Paige box that goes to remote storage…as long as we know where to find the preserved unwashed digital bits. But it’s kind of like the difference between the physical envelopes of mail piling up and your inbox filling with megs and megs…you might just toss everything out in either case, but in my opinion you’re more likely to empty the inbox without examination than to toss all the paper without a glance. Intentional dark e-storage isn’t quite preservation and it isn’t access. It is sure to be more expensive than storage in a very stable dry, cool box; we’ll be outsourcing conversion of things we can’t even read, no floppy drives for miles around, sometimes without knowing a thing about the contents. And we don’t yet have a plan for metadatification of the dark content.

I’m not arguing in favor of dry, cool boxes for everything…just musing before embarking. I will need to bring up some points and try to seem credible beyond my actual place in the foodchain.

the space that is d

Well DSPace is friendly. The web self of it is friendly…and happily, all the rest is command line, happy! No sniping, really happy. Prefer it, nearly, possibly. Though functionality is not high or many or multifarious, yet…I know there are command line secrets.

drup

Not having a wonderful time with Drupal. Dug a great hole, leapt into it, with great travail and the aid of some last-semester techno-friends, climbed back out. I have a way with problems beyond my current ability to solve, and Drupal offered a number of open doors straight to them. At one point I declared “I’M A PROGRAMMER NOT A WEB DESIGNER” and on some simpleheaded level this may be true but what I meant was, stop making my crazy with both the websense and the programmersense. I found that Drupal required both sensibilities which is, I believe, why I went briefly to crazy world. Trying to figure out if the problem at hand, say, needing to create the node for an image before attaching it to my mosaic node, was superficial or complex took a lot of system resources. Or which content was spoken of as external-linkable. Or how the entirety of views_slideshow works. The good news is that I sure have the hang of downloading, unpacking, and installing the modules. I figure any Linux experience is good Linux experience. And I’m grateful for the problems, only because they seem fixed now, and before that because I had to rifle around for tools to help me out. Though I was warned it wouldn’t help, I found phpMyAdmin my best friend sorting out users relative to roles, and ESPECIALLY in locating, by lost-user-ID-number, some dead and orphaned content that was haunting my site.

However. I loved being introduced to Drupal and would love to play more, with guidance. I think it’s an entirely appropriate setting for my collection on mosaics and is value-added relative to any and all websites I have attempted in the past. It could actually encourage me to build the site, to seek content, to enhance content, to organize content, in a way that Dreamweaver does not. It is collection-aware, and it’s the first software I’ve experienced of its kind. I’d like to find out what Drupal regulars feel is the “average” learning curve, or whether Drupal “drop-ins”, infrequent users or one-time-project users, can quantify their learning curve.

Difficult and praiseworthy both is Drupal, but not huge degrees of difference from this setting, WordPress. I still have learning to do here, could potentially mount at least an exhib of mosaics here, with some web content, some text…

fall, change, decline, renewal

This semester is feeling more…less…more isolated. Not in a bad way. In a grow up and take the reins way. Stand up and troubleshoot the connection way.

pace, ca. unit 3

As for the doing technology part of IRLS675, I say bring it all on. The more the merrier I am. The more practical, the more delightful. Asked to comment on our technology assignments and the pace, compared to IRLS672 to some degree, so far it feels like perhaps 25% less pressure, or 25% less material to cover, (which in a sense is disappointing) but…

I lie because here’s my feeling about it: we’ve covered some pretty big pieces of technology. To get the hang of all that a LAMP server means could take very nice hours of practice and play every week since 672 ended in August. And now we add JHOVE and Drupal. Drupal…I took hours last night I guess you could call it playing, but it’s such a broad canvas that I might call it being distracted. We were given good, clear instruction to stick to the core, not the pretty, but even so…distractions. So I’m not sure if I spent too much or too little time.

Upshot: good pacing so far given other requirements. I always need more time, time, time, to read as the slowest reader on this planet. The more the reading integrates with the practical, applied work, the better. I like the two-track concept for this course, I think.

action

REALLY want to dive completely INTO Drupal but there is so much to ABSORB. I walk about my electronic life and see that everything is possibly Drupal. What a great kit.

reading Kent State

I chose for unit 2’s assignment 5 to read “Building a Local CMS at Kent State” by Rick Wiggins, Jeph Remley, and Tom Klingler (via Emerald access to Library Hi Tech vol. 24 issue 1).

Kent State interested me because it’s big (14 libraries, 8 campuses) and would therefore present complexity aplenty, I believed, in a project as pivotal as choosing a CMS. It fascinated me that they would have chosen to build their own rather than use something off the shelf. On the other hand, I assumed that they would have a large IT staff in the library system and might therefore routinely devote resources to building their own.

Kent State was ready for a third-generation web system based on users’ desires, not librarians’, and they paid and fed subjects to participate in usability studies. Another sign of largesse borne of largeness. They favored a system that would distribute responsibility for content to a very high degree (and that’s what they ended up with). They desired an ADA-compliant system of classified, not hierarchically arranged, pages with a more professional look, greater automation, and consistency (less “undesired ‘creativity’” on the part of contributors).

This article did not in any way address stresses or conflicts or difficulties–somewhat disappointing in the end. And it did not reveal in any specifics why the off-the-shelf options, including Drupal, failed to satisfy their list of desiderata, simply categorically stating that lots and lots of open source (as that was their preference) options didn’t meet this or that requirement. It was easy to read between the lines that full-bore testing of all the available options was not how they wanted to spend the time they could be building something.

They seem to have poured resources into developing a front end that would enable practically every library staff member to contribute or edit content–this is really interesting, and not a choice I think every work culture would work well with. It means high confidence in a crowd of people, albeit with somewhat locked-down choices; it also means a very granular user interface.

The system was technically a MAMP setup. The project apparently saw simultaneous development of the new site design, the CMS, and content for the site; this is a point where some sense of how this played out on the calendar (not mentioned) would have been helpful and interesting. I cannot believe that obstacles were not encountered.

They also made huge use of two student employees who seem to have served as liaisons, or maybe ambassadors, between the developers and staff and who were responsible for creating both a training manual and context-sensitive help within the system for staff. Again, a large place with a library school on site would have some real talent available in the student pool, so this went believably smoothly.

In general I would have liked to know what was difficult when and, from a project management perspective, how buy-in of staff members was insured. The system itself sounded a lot like what I imagine Drupal and others to be, possibly with more built-in “hall monitor” activity, making sure that the legions of staff involved stay on top of their plots within the greater realm.

ontological shards

I am carrying on from our IRLS672 database efforts my collection of mosaics made and photographed. I hope that this does not prove too simple-minded and self-centered as we go; it offers the advantage of clarity of ownership of both objects and digital surrogates, and I hope to expand the collection to include related material.

There are currently about 17 physical objects, but I also have photographs I’ve taken of mosaic work I’ve visited and found inspirational or just interesting. I took up this hobby about two years ago as something I had visited in childhood and always wanted to return to; I have in mind eventually selling some pieces, and miraculously sold one at an arts benefit silent auction. I have considered listing the pieces on Etsy.com, eventually, when I’m roaring good. Meanwhile, they are fodder for metadata manipulation.

Anyone may access this collection, though I should devise copyright insignia possibly, or not.

The Shirky article did (re-)awaken my consciousness of all the interesting problems around organization. I get it that “there is no shelf”, from time to time; it is hard to shake the schooling and training that has built certain automatic expectations. One of my first thoughts was that someone else might assign the word “kitsch” to mosaics, or something else that might get my hackles up. My collection qualifies well for ontological classification, actually, according to Shirky, being small and well-defined, described by an authoritative source of judgment, and with “edges” (physically and metaphorically).

So some terms, a la Shirky, not Library of Congress, might include:

abstract, art, beads, ceramic, color, crafts, decoration, design, encrustation, garden design, geometric, glass, grout, hobby, inlay, interior design, kitsch, millefiori, mirrors, mosaicists, mosaics, oblong, ornament, oval, pavement, pebbles, round, shards, shells, square, stained glass, stones, tesserae, tile, vitreous.

I may create an EAD finding aid for all of the pieces collectively, one for the research material…could, if I had an ILS, create a MARC record for each piece…with the images I could create a METS file…but my mind is not expansive enough to see all the possibilities. Must expand.

entering 675

It’s a new day, a new week, a new DigIn semester. Not nearly as wary as last May, but as ever, concerned and anticipatory and…unknowing.