From what I’ve seen so far, technological proficiency is an absolute must in the digital collections world, so, on the positive side, I think the more that we can learn and get comfortable with these systems, and the more facets that we see, the better — we can see more clearly what we don’t know as well as what we do.

That said, I’m also very new to the curatorial world–a desire to put together meaningful, thematic digital collections that explore issues and topics in a variety of ways. This desire to create is what led me to explore and then get very excited by the potential I discovered in digital collections; that and the great things I saw people doing in the digital world literally made me rethink my career direction, so that I’ve moved from wanting to pretty much focus on subject liaison work, collection development, and programming to a combination of these with digital collections management, digital curation, and archivist/special collections work in a few short months.

Maybe it’s because all of these areas are also new explorations for me that I find myself wishing for more time to get my sea legs in working with collections as a way of thinking and conceiving what it means to provide access to materials about history and culture. I wish at times that time spent on downloading and/or problems could be time I’d spend trying to figure out how best to assemble a collection about an idea — to figure out what kinds of materials I’d need and how best to describe and display them. I’ve felt these angles fall to the wayside at times in favor of the technical sides.

So, what I’d like most would be to have some experience with creating VMs (say, a couple of times), before then being able to devote my energies mainly to collection building and curation using preloaded VMs. That way, I wouldn’t wonder if I’d be spending most of my time on a problematic download, and would instead have stretches of time devoted to experimenting with what works best to present various types of materials in several different systems.

I think it would be great to have a great deal of time to play in this way, especially early in the program, so that I get a sense of what’s possible and what I haven’t thought of yet, before burrowing into the technical aspects, perhaps in a more advanced course that focuses on technical issues for budding digital collections people.

DLIST, and the related DL-Harvest, were well-organized in many ways. I appreciated being able to search by subject, year, conference, and more, and really appreciate the library information focus. And it was easy enough to locate the collections it was searching, both on the initial page and through the DL-Harvest link. My one surprise here was that it was hard to tell how the results were sorted — it wasn’t alphabetical and it wasn’t chronological, so I’m thinking it was by collection, without indicating this in the results. I think it’s helpful to see all the results together but also have the chance to see at a glance who has provided them (perhaps by clicking on a button to reveal/conceal providers or offer sort options).

As a former German Studies major, I couldn’t resist looking at MeIND (Metadata on Internet Documents) from Nordrhein-Westfalen. I thought it was great–access to many different sorts of materials, including images (great maps!), and a very broad set of collections to look in. If your search led to no results, it offered the chance to pursue similar results in other collections by clicking on a link — this was a great use of the federated search feature, assembling results to anticipate your next move, especially if you found yourself frustrated by the lack of results in one collection. Though the site clearly indexes lots of material (close to 400,000 records), it also lets you break things down by subject or document type. While having tons of records is great on the one hand, because you can find so much, on the other, it’s really a strain on many computers, and results may never be able to load (or be truly digested by their recipients!).

The Sheet Music Collection was a blast — true, some of the “access online” links led to files not found, but those that did open were very user-friendly, with beautiful pictures and ease of zooming. I liked the fact that they broke their materials up into several smallish collections, but also clearly indicated, in the results list, what collection individual pieces came from. I also thought that it was really great that they let you create and save your own virtual collections, assembled from materials on their site, which is itself a collaboration between several different places (Duke, Johns Hopkins, Indiana Univ., and UCLA).

What makes a good federated search for me is: relevancy of results (we have a federated search at USC that can be awful, leaving you wondering why in the world results are even appearing); ease of further narrowing results; links and topics for further searching along related lines; and the ability to see easily where results are coming from.

For example, I’ve been using LC subject headings, many of which are quite long — such as:
Los Angeles (Calif.)–Architecture. 20th century–Buildings, structures, etc. — well, I’ve realized that sometimes I’ve chosen slightly different subject headings in LC for the same type of object, or I’ve wondered which subject heading would best describe the object. Do I use the subject that mentions Los Angeles, or one that uses California? Did I use both to describe the images I entered on different days, or just one? Did one mention Beaux-Arts while one did not? Did one mention “city promotion” where others didn’t?

As I find myself posing these very same types of questions with uncontrolled vocabulary, including tags, I see through this process that my vocabulary really risks becoming a gigantic mess if I’m not careful!

So, I think one huge lesson from all of this that I’ve learned very concretely was anticipated in our readings: the need to really plan out how to describe your collection’s resources and how much free-form vocabulary you’ll allow (which depends, too, on what system you’re using, and how well it works with your metadata and vocabulary plans).

This unit, I didn’t have time to play with my practice repository in EPrints, but I do plan to soon — to go through the process of creating vocabulary entries beyond the default LC. I think this exercise will help me to think in terms of planning for vocabulary needs in advance.

I was reminded of this once again when I was looking around for examples of digital collections whose design I liked and came across a Duke University blog announcing their digital collection site’s upcoming redesign, at: http://library.duke.edu/blogs/digital-collections/.

What’s great about this site is that they are inviting feedback from all user on their redesign as it happens, and they offer information about its structure, including their use of Fedora, their metadata requirements and options, their posting on YouTube, Flickr, and more, and their commitment to open source technologies. Plus, I really liked their video on YouTube re: their 3d wall, at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uI1DKgX5ZuU –even if the motion in the 3D wall mode was a bit much …

I’m very pleased to be learning Drupal — I saw a poster session on it at the ALA this past summer, and had that (semi-)sinking feeling of “wow–there’s so much out there I’ll never have a chance to learn about because work is always too crazy, etc.” And yet, here it is, and I’m actually working with it. Very cool …

I think the management component of the course is indispensable, because it’s introducing us to what’s out there in the world of actual digital collection building–what ideas people have about these collections; the complexity and number of the issues one has to consider when planning for and thinking about them; the kinds of great collections people are building and for what purposes; and what systems there are out there to do this kind of work. This is all setting many of my own gears in motion …

Re: the pace — so far, so good, and just right, I’d say. Not too much of either component to complete in a week.

Here’s a brief summary: At Georgia State University Library, conversion to a CMS helped them gain control over what had been hundreds, even thousands of files and Web pages–which had been generated by 30 subject librarians, each with his or her own style and variations on content–to steamline the content and format and make it way more manageable.

I could well picture the situation they faced: Each subject liaison had been faced with creating at least one subject guide, which could involve several Web pages; many links to books, databases, journals, and other forms of resources; explanatory text; images; and more. Each liaison was on his or her own, so each person generated tons of information, and no one’s research guide necessarily had any consistency of theme or content with anyone else’s … so, it was a jumble.

The article describes how the school’s implementation of a CMS (not Drupal, but one they developed themselves) made everything so much more manageable: Developers created an architecture and modules for librarians to enter their content into and provided a standardized, but customizable, format using themes to provide consistency for users, so that each new guide would have certain sections that the user could anticipate.

I was pleased to see so many terms familiar from our 672 class: They used MySQL to manage database and ejournals lists and image banks; they used the CMS to separate form from content, and CSS style sheets for the formatting; their CMS provides space for customization through tagging and other concepts.

Key to the CMS, according to the authors, is reusability — the ability to make every resource that’s used in a guide be findable and reusable via the CMS by any other liaison with permission, so that each item would be stored in the system only once — saving storage and vastly decreasing complexity while increasing the visibility to all of the resources in the system.

The article very helpfully provides a glimpse of the tables they used to develop the system — and while these helped underscore for me how far I need to go to understand database design, I appreciated the chance to see under the hood.

These are postcards and pictures  collected from second-hand stores by a member of a hobby society who moved to California from the East Coast and who, according to her daughter, wanted to express her love of California by collecting and organizing these items.

One of my main interests in the collection is in the images of California that these postcards and their makers create, and what these images have to do with other events in California history, as well as in its history of self-promotion, of advertising, of race and class relations, of urban and rural development, etc.

I think that all sorts of people would be interested in this collection, from people who see them as examples of California’s beauty and promise to those who study California from a critical perspective; from people who are interested in anything from art history to advertising to social and cultural criticism and theory to urban planning and sociology and well beyond.

I enjoyed Shirkey’s essay a lot, and think he makes some great points about the potential of tags to unlock search and discovery and untie it from rigid categories — for example, terms you could apply to images of early 20th-century Southern California as seen in picture postcards could be practically anything, depending on the user’s perspective: mythmaking; imagemaking; advertising; selling the Golden State; California history; California tourism; California Dream; postcards and nostalgia; and more.

I think the idea of tags is exciting, and I think Shirkey is right on the mark when he discusses the vast differences and meaning that are seen in the choices of words people use to describe things–just look at all the associations that people are appending to the word “Medicare” and the concept of a single payer healthcare system.

But I’ve also learned quite a bit by browsing, and I think his example of the obstreperous Minnesota search brings up one problem I see with the Search perspective, and that is: I have discovered quite a lot by finding interesting resources by browsing; then clicking on their subject category links to find more books grouped according to the often many categories listed in the record–in effect, using subject categorization as a spur to browsing that leads to discoveries that maybe even can put ideas like “obstreperous” together with “Minnesota” in the first place. Sometimes, through basic browsing and perusal of subject headings, I have found categories it would never occur to me existed, and that has caused me to think about things in a different way.

I’m not trying to say that the same thing couldn’t happen with tags — in fact, I think tags could lead you to all sorts of great discovery, and I agree with Shirky that categorization forecloses too many options and freezes things in time and particular ways of thinking.

But I do think that categories have potential for helping people find their way to things in the first place by creating pointers to subjects that people don’t necessarily know of to tag in the first place. Definitely, I’ve seen a great deal of value in faceted results provided once a person has used a single search box to begin looking for things, as Shirky mentions.

In any case, I’m excited to experiment with these ideas as I try to describe and draw people to the collections I build, starting with this one!

In general, I appreciated Cervone’s overviews of risk management, methodology for working on digital projects and for what NOT to do, and decision making. I thought his article on risk management was very helpful, and I had to laugh at WAG — believe it or not, I’d never heard that before, and of course this sums up the approach that lots and lots of people will use when working on these! And what I’ve done myself, too, on other types of projects, so I’m not exempting myself!

I think the risk factors Cervone mentions are spot on, including especially misunderstanding the requirements (so often, by getting excited at the great PR a project could provide, without analyzine what, and who, would need to be involved, and exactly how, including how much time tasks would take) and lack of attention to users in all the ways mentioned (commitment; involvement; and expectations).

I do wonder, though, as I did for Cervone’s decision-making matrix, whether some of the supposedly “scientific” quantifications demanded by his models for calculating risk (or arriving at decisions) aren’t themselves open to lots of WAGging, under the veneer of scientific management?

For example, for risk prioritization (p. 260, Risk Managment article), isn’t the difference between a ”high effect” of risk requiring “mandatory change to scope, schedule, or resources” and a “medium effect,” where “significant replanning will be required,” pretty subjective and vague?  Too often, I think that people put so much faith in numbers that they forget that they’re providing numerical values to their own opinions and viewpoints, so that a number really shouldn’t be taken as scientific fact. For similar reasons, I found myself raising an eyebrow at Option Assessment Matrix on p. 34 of the article, “Making Decisions” — I wonder, ultimately, if all those numbers really add up to anything better than a good, analytical conversation, with a few well-developed lists, would achieve.

I enjoyed the article on project escalation, and have seen this happen many times, for the reasons Keil mentions. I think the suggestion to analyze the project at various points from an outsider’s perspective is a very good one–in fact, I’ve encountered many escalations where an outsider’s questioning, especially regarding the foundational assumptions behind a project, would have either scuttled or radically changed a project for the better–including a library re-organization that failed to take account of the most basic aspects of people’s jobs (how much time they needed to spend on their various tasks and what was involved in these). Had someone ever said, during this last example, that it was key to realize that one person’s job would need to take twice as many hours as another’s and that therefore one shouldn’t give the already-overburdened person yet more work without redistributing some of his/her tasks, much heartache (and flight) may have been averted.

To be specific: Not only did I have no experience whatsoever with Linux; Unix; servers; routers; programming languages; command lines; XML; user communities and help sites; Apache; SQL; and other topics — I’d also never done some VERY basic things before, such as blogging and burning CDs! (I’d always meant to do these last things, along with some of the first, but there you go–I just never had time or the occasion or whatever …).

So, this course has introduced me to a lot of, as our prompt says, “factual knowledge and technical skills,” and in a very small chunk of time.

Beyond this, the course has been very helpful for demystifying some of these things, and for helping me to realize that, though much can be daunting, there are ways to get help that will make sense (usually).

AND it’s reinforced to me the absolute crucial importance of organization as I learn about things technological — where concepts are fine just living in your head, at least for me, with my less-than-stellar memory, I need all of my technological stuff written down, readily accessible. As I’ve said before, I know I need to go back over everything we’ve done and write down all the key commands for all the key components of what we’ve learned — otherwise, I drown–for example, finding myself scrambling around through all my notes to find the “recipe” for shutting down from VM or for using nano or whatever.

Have I changed my perspective on any aspect of digital information as a result of my studies? Yes: For one thing, I’m convinced that it would be very worthwhile to explore using open source software for digital collections, provided that there are people who can be dedicated to ensuring that it works. I love the community and free-development aspects of it, and think it’s really cool that it’s open for all to participate and learn.

I also think that training and experience in building tables and queries is crucial, as is much time spent on thoughtful database design, in order to develop the best possible databases to undergird digital collections — through excellent design, these collections really could best serve users, and through knowledge of how tables are built and how to break down information into its atomic components, one can design interfaces that can best guide users to the information they need, as well as to discovery.

Finally, I loved the idea that, though there’s much to learn still and very far to go, we already have worked with the basic components of working with digital collections: operating systems; web servers; record management systems/databases; and scripting in order to grab and display information. Seeing the process whole is, for me, the best position to be in to move forward, so the course is leaving me at a good plateau.

I didn’t really find anything this week conceptually difficult, exactly (last week and database design is another story, though!). My problem is mainly that I find myself forgetting what we’ve done in one unit as we move into the next, and I get a bit overwhelmed by the contents of the reading, because I’m not sure how much should really be making complete sense at this stage of the game.

In any case, though, as we approach the end of this course, I know exactly what I need to do to learn AND to figure out where exactly my problems and questions lie.

It’s what I always need to do to make things stick and figure out what I really don’t get, especially when it comes to learning about technology, or anything else that doesn’t come completely naturally: I need to make it through everything once (i.e., finish up the rest of our units to the best of my current abilities, noting questions and problems as I go) and then, once the last assignment is turned in, I’ll start over and review everything — compiling notes and important commands; reviewing lectures for each component; making sure that key resources and links are handy for each topic; and organizing everything so that I can easily find what I need.

It’s only once I’ve had a chance to go back over everything like this, after having had an initial glimpse of the “whole,” that I’ll be able to say what I have conceptual–or other–problems with.

As far as SQL goes — I actually really have enjoyed working with MySQL. It may be that I’m getting more and more used to command lines, of course. I also think it may be that the commands themselves provide plenty of information and, at least so far, clear patterns that seem easy enough to read, remember, and follow (for example, for combining tables in queries). As I type, I can find myself visualizing the tables and the primary keys … this helps reinforce those structures in my mind while encouraging me to think through the structure of queries.