Slick&Simple, Safe&Awkward, and Kah-lunky!!

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!

Tagadelic, for a "retro" tag cloud

In another assignment configuring a Drupal site for a digital collection, I used Tagadelic as my chosen extra module. I used this site as an installation guide, which was great, except that I wanted a tag cloud because I think they're new and hip, and this guy refers to them as "old-fashioned." Will I never catch up to these people?

In any case I recommend Tagadelic; it's very simple. My collection has plenty of repeat metadata and this allows those resources to immediately appear on the same page, as well as showing the viewer what we see a lot of thanks to the larger fonts for frequent tags. Here are two screenshots of my tags, one a cloud since it's every tag from my collection, the other a list.

CMS: Costs More Skronk

I just finished reading the following article: "Building a local CMS at Kent State", by Rick Wiggins, Jeph Remley, and Tom Klingler, of Libraries & Media Services, Kent State University. To summarize, the Kent State University Library website, made mostly of static html pages built in Dreamweaver, was looking and functioning worse and worse due to inconsistencies created in the collaborative environment in which it was being created. The project was undertaken to create a website for the library that more effectively met the needs of the library's staff and users, including metadata creation and more effective database functionality. A variety of Content Management Systems were researched by the project team, who determined that none of the CMS's they examined was the right fit. The project then became the writing of a local Content Management System, with the team for this new project given the tight deadline of fourteen months to accomplish the task. The new CMS was developed using the input of focus groups, then implemented with the training of staff. The layout of the site, including the content creator interface, and the tools for the varying levels of management, have been laid out in the article. The CMS and resulting site have been pronounced successful.

Of all the articles about CMS's in Library Hi Tech's 2006 issue, which focused entirely on these systems, I was interested in this one because I have just begun working with Drupal, and I was curious what needs the Kent State Library had that Drupal could not meet. It seems the main areas of unmet need, in the original project researchers' 2006 estimation, centered on metadata. First, they wanted metadata to form a basis for the site. The resulting CMS uses metadata to organize the pages, and allows metadata search, as opposed to keyword search. Another need not met by Drupal or the other existing CMS's was to have the site send an email when a new resource was added that would alert library staff to play their respective roles in metadata creation. This was also ultimately accomplished by the new CMS and site.

The site in question, http://www.library.kent.edu if I'm not outdated, is indeed smooth and professional. It feels like there is more content and more streamlined function than many of the Drupal sites I've seen. But I wonder if project 1 would have turned into project 2 in, say, 2009? Not likely. For one thing, the metadata tools they required may have been added to one of the Open Source CMS's by then. Plus, days grew dark. As in:

Question: "Should we initiate project costing many thousands of dollars, or just create a module for Drupal or another pre-existing CMS?"

Answer: "Well, considering we just cut all of our part time staff...".

But this article is a valuable resource, a map of a road less traveled, successfully illuminated. So libraries, mark the metadata below. When the recession is over, you'll know where your roadmap is!

Article Type:

Technical paper
Keyword(s):

Content management; Information management; Libraries.
Journal:

Library Hi Tech
Volume:

24
Number:

1
Year:

2006
pp:

69-101
Copyright ©

Emerald Group Publishing Limited
ISSN:

0737-8831