After dealing with Omeka this week I have enough CMS's and data curation tools under my belt to categorize. There are three categories: Slick&Simple, Safe&Awkward, and Kah-lunky!!
Kah-lunky: This term is reserved for the tools that make you wish you could go back to the hammer, spike, and stone tablet to post your information. Jhove and Harvester inspired this feeling in me. In the middle of troubleshooting (in the case of Jhove) or just plain giving up on the mess my repository was turned into (in the case of Harvester), I decided that if either of those needs to be part of my present ecosystem, I am going to have to leave that ecosystem and rejoin my amoebic brethren in the calm and brothy prehistoric sea.
Safe&Awkward: Hello Dspace! Oh...I'm sorry, did I say that too quickly? Or with too much excitement?
Slick and Simple: This would be Drupal, Eprints, and Omeka. Very impressive and fun to use. A little scary for newbies, but as I am going on my fifth CMS, I am not a newbie anymore. I'm a researcher!
Showing posts with label DSpace. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DSpace. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Monday, October 25, 2010
Robot4583 at your service...beep beep
Cataloguing was a big concern for me in Eprints. This is because I had already entered every item in other repositories: some in Drupal, some in Dspace, a few in both. So in the interest of being consistent with those previous entries I looked into importing the metadata from those CMS's into Eprints.
In Drupal, this simply did not seem possible because I didn't use Views for my collection. It could be that if I created a view for it, I could export it, and I may try that in the future. I expect there are modules to make this all work better but when you are evaluating systems on the time span that I am, you don't necessarily ever reach this step.
In Dspace I was able to export my collection to a zipped folder, but I couldn't get the hand of batch importing into Eprints if that is even possible. (It should be.) So instead I manually uploaded all 4 or 5 files (including one classified as "other" and therefore requiring a description, which I made DspaceBundleDescription for each) from each dspace item from that bulk export, then manually added title (copied and pasted from dublin core xml doc), abstract, creators, and status. All this me from having to enter details. I also started adding keywords (listed as subject in the Dspace-exported dublin _ore xml doc). And I selected Plain Text for format for the DspaceBundleDescription "Other" doc for each item, and also selected "Additional Metadata" for the dublin core xml docs.
Nonetheless I still had to then detail the record, adding at the very least: Title, Creators, and Status (I selected Submitted). All then had to be approved by me.
Eprints gave me many areas where I had to repeat identical metadata in this collection and this definitely led to human error. I minimized this as best I could by opening the Dspace-exported dublin_core.xml doc for each record and pasting from it and also constantly referencing it as I described the item in Eprints. But this felt like it should be unnecessary, and was certainly less foolproof than a computerized entry system.
One day, they'll sort out repositories so that humans only have to do what humans are good at: enter new concepts. For now, though, this is Robot4583, signing off.
In Drupal, this simply did not seem possible because I didn't use Views for my collection. It could be that if I created a view for it, I could export it, and I may try that in the future. I expect there are modules to make this all work better but when you are evaluating systems on the time span that I am, you don't necessarily ever reach this step.
In Dspace I was able to export my collection to a zipped folder, but I couldn't get the hand of batch importing into Eprints if that is even possible. (It should be.) So instead I manually uploaded all 4 or 5 files (including one classified as "other" and therefore requiring a description, which I made DspaceBundleDescription for each) from each dspace item from that bulk export, then manually added title (copied and pasted from dublin core xml doc), abstract, creators, and status. All this me from having to enter details. I also started adding keywords (listed as subject in the Dspace-exported dublin _ore xml doc). And I selected Plain Text for format for the DspaceBundleDescription "Other" doc for each item, and also selected "Additional Metadata" for the dublin core xml docs.
Nonetheless I still had to then detail the record, adding at the very least: Title, Creators, and Status (I selected Submitted). All then had to be approved by me.
Eprints gave me many areas where I had to repeat identical metadata in this collection and this definitely led to human error. I minimized this as best I could by opening the Dspace-exported dublin_core.xml doc for each record and pasting from it and also constantly referencing it as I described the item in Eprints. But this felt like it should be unnecessary, and was certainly less foolproof than a computerized entry system.
One day, they'll sort out repositories so that humans only have to do what humans are good at: enter new concepts. For now, though, this is Robot4583, signing off.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
That's all she rote
I really enjoy the way Bruce will instruct us to do something we did weeks or even months before, and expect us to figure out how to do it again. He is very offhand as he does this, isn't he? As if he doesn't realize that most of us are going to have to go back into this video from week 2, that tutorial from week 1, the install guide from 672 (which hopefully we have, since D2L sure doesn't anymore!), and click back and forth between three different pdfs all the while. UNTIL four hours later, you successfully reach line 2 of the 9-page TechAssignment document for the week.
Obviously this is the best way to make us learn these steps on our own, and in fact I feel fortunate he walks us so carefully through the steps of each install the first time. But I always wonder, is he laughing when he writes those simple statements?
Installation of DSpace wasn't horrific for me. But the more complex an install is, the less I am able to know what the meaning of each step is, and this install was more rote than any I have done this semester. It only helped, oddly enough, to be using VirtualBox instead of VMware. This is because I learned this week that I may be the only one in our class doing this, when I discovered that my version of Linux is older than most of the other students', who installed theirs in 672. (I installed one on a VMware machine in 672 as well, but had to switch computers. Now I hope to never go back; VirtualBox is much less awkward about mouse and keyboard integration than VMware.) So I sometimes have to troubleshoot a little differently than the others, and this gets me thinking.
Obviously this is the best way to make us learn these steps on our own, and in fact I feel fortunate he walks us so carefully through the steps of each install the first time. But I always wonder, is he laughing when he writes those simple statements?
Installation of DSpace wasn't horrific for me. But the more complex an install is, the less I am able to know what the meaning of each step is, and this install was more rote than any I have done this semester. It only helped, oddly enough, to be using VirtualBox instead of VMware. This is because I learned this week that I may be the only one in our class doing this, when I discovered that my version of Linux is older than most of the other students', who installed theirs in 672. (I installed one on a VMware machine in 672 as well, but had to switch computers. Now I hope to never go back; VirtualBox is much less awkward about mouse and keyboard integration than VMware.) So I sometimes have to troubleshoot a little differently than the others, and this gets me thinking.
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