Unit 4 - Drupal Cont.

This week, you might choose to comment on how suitable Drupal might be for your collection. Begin to develop some criteria you would use to judge how well an application such as Drupal meets the needs of your collection and its users. We will expand on this problem over the semester.

It seems that the advantage of Drupal is, in short, management. In order to benefit from the management features, there need to be contributors. Hopefully, if building a digital library of items, people would not be assigned such a project alone, so I see Drupal being very beneficial for any project involving several contributors and regular updates.

My collection is a small sample, so it is difficult to see the benefit in the case of fifteen items which will remain static so long as I am the only one working on it. Features in content management, user management, and site building do show a great deal of flexibility. I can regulate which authenticated users control precisely which actions (e.g. creation, editing, deletion) in precisely which areas of expertise (e.g. planes, trains, automobiles, you name it, etc). Modules create even more options to explore, but from those that I used (date & cck), they were options which I could already control from site building. Well, the modules do speak for an active community of developers and certainly contain useful tools (if you can find them).

Unit 1 - Gathering a Digital Collection

It took me a couple of weeks to decide on a digital collection that would: 1) Not be made up of vacation photos, 2) Potentially useful/informative to others and 3) Be a subject on which I have some knowledge. Most of the digital collections I visited had historic photos or historic texts on subjects from transportation to baseball. Since I am not a historian or a sports fan, I finally settled on a series of French lesson audio files.

When it comes to categorizing the files, format and date are of little use. My first inclination is to allow tagging them by difficulty level, subject, author, and location where the conversation is supposedly taking place (e.g. Paris, Nice or Senegal).

Unit 11 - Course Retrospective

All the nuts and bolts finally got put into place to put a web server online, create a database, host it online, and make the information retrievable with the power of PHP & MySQL queries. Technical aspects aside, my feelings toward digital collections went from "it would be great if I could" to "now I can actually put a searchable database out on the web." I don't think that my perspective on digital collections has changed, because my goals for information sharing are still the same. I am still moved by the same cultural projects that communities gather and put online to educate themselves and others. If my perspective has changed somewhere it would be with the power of open source software and the role it can play in similar projects.

Unit 10 - MySQL

I thought that MySQL was easier to learn than some other concepts presented in the course, because it is human readable. "Select photographer_lname from photographers" is not very cryptic. Even getting into some of the commands such as joining tables, order by, where like %, and counting are still understandable. It does take some practice to see how these operators work together and to practice writing well formed queries without mistakes, but overall this was unproblematic. In fact, this is the point in the course where I began to feel that there was some power within my keystrokes. I could write a table, write a query, and see the fruits of my labors in the results. Finally, I was creating information and asking the program to find patterns in the data.

Unit 8 - Technology Planning

During these readings, I was not surprised by the lack of effective planning in technology industry especially to do with software development, because I have read about this for some other courses. But what I was tickled to learn which I did not know was that more projects fail for running overtime than for running over budget. There seems to be a culture of "just do it" in the technology field with a minority of companies that weave an effective "let's plan it!" into the project. But we should all know by now that spending ten percent of our project time making a blueprint for a house will save use ten times the reworking pain when the home does not meet homebuyer's requirements or construction code, heck the chimney went in the bathroom! Doers have a reputation for being great at doing, but must be convinced that planning now is not a waste of time, but a time saver later when the work does not have to be reworked. My friend is experiencing this right now, because no one thought the project warranted a plan. Now, team members are learning that they have very different ideas about the basic goals of the project and how it is supposed to look. Rather than defining goals, they have been assigned tasks and milestones (all well and good), but when they reach those milestones, the manager discovers the work is not what was desired and the vicious cycle continues.

Unit 7 - XML and hosting

The w3schools tutorials are very helpful to me and usually give enough information to get started. I prefer a textual tutorial rather than pausing a video, rewinding it, and listening over again if I was unclear. The textual guides let me read/learn at my pace rather than the pace of the speaker. This was my first experience with XML and it showed me just how flexible it is. Rather than being restricted to the preconfigured tags of a language like HTML, XML allows me to categorize items as I wish. This freedom does create the problem of whether certain lines should be an element or an attribute. As is usually the case with an organization scheme, it depends on how one will use the information. There is some gratification in thinking through whether to write an attribute or an element and its justification. Here is the XML scheme that I wrote for practice.

Unit 6 - HTML

In order to refresh my memory on HTML, because the basics have not really changed, I worked my way through the www.w3schools.com HTML tutorial. I created a practice file that links to a couple of other practice files within a folder.

After working through the HTML tags in an essentially draft document with no real content, just to use the tags, I rewrote my u.arizona.edu homepage with an updated biography, updated photo, and links that I have discovered through this last school year. Now, my page may not use all of the formatting and styles that I learned from the tutorial, but now I have a reference file with my own notes that I had see when I need to implement a new convention on my web page.