Embed Media-Youtube (IRLS675-Unit 5)

I added the Embed Media module for my site so that I can embed music videos of each song that I upload to the collection. I had to also install the youtube-specific module in order to import 3rd party content directly from youtube. There were other sites that I could use, but I figured youtube is pretty universally accepted and easy to find things. So far, I like it! It took a minute to figure out how to configure everything properly so the field shows up, but I got it.

Drupaling My Collection (IRLS675-Unit 4)

Right now, Drupal doesn't seem ideal for a music collection. First of all, audio files tend to be rather large, so I would use up a lot of digital storage space very quickly. I use Drupal to manage the SIRLS webpage too, but we utilize iTunesU for hosting our podcasts. I suppose if this was a real project, I would have to seek copyright permissions from all of the artists in my collection, but it would be great to figure out how to stream the music online instead of uploading an mp3 that other people download. I'm not sure at this point how to do that in Drupal, but it would lessen the problem of contributing to the music industry's pirating problems if the items couldn't be directly downloaded. I'm wondering what other programs might be best for audio file sharing without infringing on copyright as much.

Pace of the Tech Assignments (IRLS675-Unit 3)

I'm a very busy boi this semester. I'm taking 4 courses (10 credits), working 2 graduate assistantships, and have a key leadership role in both the Progressive Librarians Guild and Pride Alliance on the UA campus. Therefore, the pace of the course seems a bit fast for me, but it may be because I am busier than most people at the moment. I definitely intend on keeping up the pace, no matter what pace that is, in order to be successful in this course, but I feel that it would be more manageable in my case to slow it down a bit (especially on weeks where we would need to install another virtual machine, since that takes several hours of downloads and configurations).

Content Management on a Budget (IRLS675-Unit 2)

This week, I looked at Regina Beach and Miqueas Dial’s article “Building a collection development CMS on a shoe-string,” which discusses a collection-specific CMS project at the Texas A&M University-Kingsville (TAMUK) Library, serving 5,000 students. TAMUK is a small campus and did not have the financial means to easily improve their collection development by purchasing commercial software and having a full-time tech team, so they decided to create one in-house from scratch.

The authors specifically wanted to develop this system to adequately support distance students at the school. The first step was changing the technical services workflow so that data only had to be entered once when faculty requested books through the database. The database was created in MS Access and the relationships behind the scenes look like this:

While what the faculty sees look like this:

As of publication (2005), this system was still in prototype testing and it was unclear whether or not the resources would be available to fully implement the system. The authors found that while development and completion of the CMS database was accomplished in a timely fashion, implementation in the library has been slow because of negotiating security issues.

It was interesting hearing about this endeavor and the challenges that it presented. I hadn't really thought about security issues yet, so I plan to explore this aspect of collection management a bit more in creating my collection repository.