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.

Starting My Collection (IRLS675-Unit 1)

The assignment:

Gather a small collection of digital objects, perhaps 15-20 items. These might be digital images,

sound files, text files and other digital documents. These may also be digital surrogates (e.g.

photographs of physical objects). The collection should be of interest to you, and it should be something you know a little about. It should also be reasonably diverse, so the same terms or tags would not be used to describe each of the items. These should not be hypothetical items or catalog description records only; you should have the objects in hand (or, more accurately, on disk). You will enter this collection into Drupal in a couple of weeks providing both hierarchical and faceted access based on a simple taxonomy of terms and tags you will develop. You will also enter this collection in other repository systems over the coming weeks.

Using these guidelines, I have decided to create a repository of LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer) music. I just made a mix cd of about 20 songs, so I will use these songs as the basis for my collection. I would imagine that LGBTQ people, professors/students in gender & sexuality studies, and those in the music industry would find this collection useful and interesting. The LGBTQ community is very diverse, so choosing accurate language and tags will be very important in managing the collection.


Types of terms that will be used include:

• Subject Identity Terms: This would refer to the identities either explicitly or implicitly portrayed in the song. For instance, "gay male," "lesbian," "transgender," "polyamory," etc.


• Genre: This refers to the category of music the song belongs to. For instance, "Country," "Hip Hop," "Rock," "Bluegrass," etc.


• Identifying Features: This would be basic information including "Song Title," "Artist Name," "Album," "Year," etc.

Project Management (IRLS672-Unit 12)

I enjoyed Cervone's "How Not to Run a Digital Library Project." It was written in a conversational style and was unique among the articles for this week.

His DON'T tips included:

-not bothering to understand project requirements

-forgetting to plan because it's too time consuming

-committing to a budget and schedule before knowing what you're actually supposed to do

-using WAG as a best guess

-adding more personnel when a project is running behind

-ignoring the critical path

-not worrying about the project's potential downfalls

-adding things to the project once it's already in motion

-and believing you don't need outside help at all

Project management seems to be quite complex because you need to be a jack-of-all-trades, a psychic, and a good leader/coach/mentor. However, if done right, project management can provide the needed results on time and on budget.

First DigIn Course Nearly Complete! (IRLS672-Unit 11)

Looking back on this summer semester, I can't believe how much information we got through and how far I've come. I went from vague recollections of DOS to pwning the command line! Actually, I have a loooong way to go, but I think I'm off to a good start. We've gone through linux, nano, hmtl, websites, servers, tech plans, databases, php scripting, and will soon be covering project management. Not bad for a summer course!

This class showed me that digital librarianship may be a bit more complicated than I initially thought, but it also showed me that I can accomplish a lot when I put my mind to it. I'm determined to not have to rely on an IT department every time I need a tiny thing. I think all librarians should have some of this tech knowledge in order to be empowered, not threatened, in the digital age.

SQuirreL (IRLS 672-Unit 10)

I don't know why, but SQL makes me think of the world "squirrel" lol. Anyway, learning SQL wasn't much harder technically that the other stuff we've been doing, but I think it was really challenging conceptually. It's hard to visualize a relational database and what needs to be in there and how to search it. We're all really familiar with the user interface, but the interface is so different that the actual data behind the scenes. It's kinda like using a googledoc to do a survey in that the people taking the survey see a nice pretty form that they just fill in, while I get to see an ugly spreadsheet of everyone's answers. The pretty is nicer, but the ugly is certainly more useful. They say ignorance is bliss, but we're too far down the rabbit hole to stop now!