Week 4: Changing Gears

This week threw me for a loop. During a meeting on Thursday, I found out that I really didn't need to be spending time figuring out how to make things work in Drupal, or any other CMS for that matter. We will hire "rent-a-coders" to customize the CMS once we have decided what features we want. My involvement is to research what those features should be, and to guide the process of making the whole thing happen. My role is purely project management and not really hands-on as far as implementing the site, which I hadn't been entirely clear on before.

It was decided in the meeting that we will be using Drupal for sure. The interface for users to add their own content should be "dirt easy", meaning users shouldn't have to log in or use the CMS back-end at all, which isn't possible with Drupal as it is (at least, not that I can tell). So the coders we hire will be be in charge of making this possible. My job now is to research the Drupal community in Iowa and elsewhere and find people we can approach about doing this for us, and/or coming in and training people in the office on using Drupal. I will find people to design the interface; Cliff mentioned design students at the U of I as a possibility as they have volunteered their services before. I will also be in touch with Widernet contacts in Africa who will help us decide on what features should be included, as well as adding local content to the demo version that will be shown to Intel in December or January.

So far, I've put in an inquiry with a Drupal consulting and development business that has an associate in Ames, to see if they can help us out. With the Intel grant, we can afford to pay outside people, although I need to find out for sure what our budget is for that. I also found a group of Drupal enthusiasts in Iowa, and I plan to post a message to their group site next week. Next week I will work further on getting in contact with other people who we can use on the project.

Week 3: Not Quite Sure What I'm Doing Yet...

This week saw less progress than usual due to an illness, which left me missing two days of work. I also had three meetings over the course of the week, so I wasn't left with a lot of time to do project work. I basically continued with what I had been working on last week - experimenting with Drupal and Site@School. On Friday we had Drupal "expert" Matt Arant come in and walk the whole staff through the basics of Drupal, since the Widernet website is being migrated. Matt and I are going to meet next week so he can talk with me about how Drupal can be used to create a user-customized template.

I have a general idea of how this can be done, but the specifics are still sort of eluding me. For example, will each user of the eGranary have to create an account in the CMS in order to change the template, or just use the administrator account? How might the fact that it will be housed on a local server make using it different? I also added the Drupal module that let's the administrator create customized fields for users to populate, but it seems pretty complicated and I'm not having a lot of success figuring it out on my own. I'm hoping Matt can show me how to do it.

I also spent some time investigating other CMS's that we could use. One possibility I found was called EZPublish, which has a very intuitive-looking user interface. I don't have it installed yet but will probably give it a test run next week. Since I'm also familiar with Joomla (I used it for a group project in Electronic Publishing last spring), I'm thinking I should see how it would compare to Drupal as far as meeting the needs of the project.

Next week I'll work on these things and hopefully get more done!

Week 2: Lots of Time in the Server Room

The week started off with a meeting between myself and Brent to talk more about the project. The need is for one or more templates that can be used by various community groups, e.g. schools, health clinics, etc., to create their own web pages or sites. My job during the first couple of weeks is to research various content management systems and try to determine which one/s would work best, as well as looking at existing websites of this type to see what information is commonly included.

I checked out some elementary school web sites, and found their basic content to be fairly uniform (contact info, academic calendars, faculty lists, and lunch menus are typical). I also looked at an open-source CMS specifically geared toward primary schools, called Site@School. It provides templates for schools to create and maintain their own sites for free. I installed it on the WiderNet server so I can try it out. At first glance, it looks like a good option.

The rest of the week I spent tackling Drupal. After getting it installed on the server (which was a bit tricky, but helped me brush up on my rusty command line and SQL skills), I played around and tried to figure out how it can meet our needs. There are a ton of modules to download, and I added a few that seem useful. I also did more reading and watched some online tutorials. My feeling is that Drupal can be used to do just about anything, but that very fact gives it a steep learning curve. I have a feeling I won't fully understand how it works until I have a concrete draft of the template to plug in. But it will help that WiderNet is going to start using Drupal for its website, and will be bringing in an "expert" this week to teach staff the basics.

In the coming week, I will begin working with Site at School and look around for other CMS's we might be able to use. I also need to get started on another ongoing task, which is to create documentation for the project.

Summer Recap and Semester Preview

I didn't blog this summer, though I did continue to do project work in DLS. I was officially still on the EAD "task force", which in my case involved attending the occasional meeting to keep up on the project's progress. There wasn't as much for Joanna and I to do during this time, as the main tasks fell to John (working with the Archon database) and Raj (creating the web interface). There's a day trip planned to the University of Illinois in the next couple of weeks to meet with the Archon developers, but since my involvement at this point is minimal I likely won't go. I do plan to continue going to task force meetings this semester, just to stay informed and help with anything that might be needed.

My focus this summer was on migrating the Virtual Writing University audio files into the Iowa Digital Library. I migrated two sub-collections within the VWU digital collection, which were recordings from the 2005 NonfictioNow Conference and interviews by Prof. Peter Nazareth with members of the International Writing Program (around 100 files in all). The project involved reformatting the files from wav to mp3, uploading them to contentDM, making a metadata template, creating the records, and coming up with a preliminary interface design. As a former comparative literature major, it was really interesting for me to listen to the recordings and research the writers involved in order to catalog the entries. There are more subcollections to be added and the interface to be fleshed out, which will be continued this semester by a new set of fellows.

This semester, my last, I will be working on the eGranary Digital Library at Widernet. While I'll miss DLS, it will be good to get some experience in a different setting. This week I met with Cliff Missen and Brent Palmer, my new mentors, to discuss project possibilities. We decided I will start out working to develop the template for a "community information platform", which will allow users of the eGranary to add their own content (for creating local directories, etc.). Widernet is partnering with Intel, which donated a large sum of many for the project, so it looks to be an interesting opportunity. In fact, the day after our meeting Cliff and Brent left for California to meet with the Intel folks.

I spent the rest of the week familiarizing myself with the eGranary and researching Drupal, the content management system we will use to create the template. While I haven't used Drupal before, the fact that I learned Joomla! in Electronic Publishing last semester will give me a big leg up. Next week, I'll meet with Brent to learn more about the project and discuss next steps.

Week 10-11: Troubleshooting Archon

I've been a bit remiss about keeping up on the weekly postings. This is partly because school has gotten incredibly busy, and partly because progress on the EAD project is rather slow going so I don't have a lot of regular updates to make.

As I mentioned in a previous post, we ran into trouble importing our XML files into Archon -- basically, it seems it can't be done. We were hoping this would be easily fixed, but it has turned into a significant issue (or at least, a time-consuming one). John Osborn has been diligently trying to figure out a way to work around the problem, which so far involves converting the EAD into delimited files, importing those into Archon, then exporting them as EAD (I hope I've got that right -- it's a little confusing). It's a roundabout method to accomplish what should be a straightforward task, which Archon is supposed to be able to handle. There's obviously some glitch happening, but we don't know for sure what it is.

In searching online, I haven't found as much documentation as I'd hoped about how others have implemented Archon. I did read a blog post written by a librarian who had the same problem with importing XML files, although I haven't found any information indicating the cause or solution. The main task for the remainder of the semester may well be trying to figure this out.

We've been having meetings with Jen, John, Sue, Linda, and a new apps person, Raj, to discuss the import issue and the search interface design. The meetings are great experience because they give Joanna and I an inside view of how project management and workflow actually happen on the job. I feel less like a student worker than a professional and team member, which is a good feeling.

In addition, we've also been continuing to encode finding aids for the sample set using our template. After much debate about how to handle the intellectual hierarchy of the container lists, which can be hard to discern from the finding aids, we decided to simplify it as much as possible. This means not specifying levels like series, subseries or folder, and just using numbered container tags to indicate different levels. This makes things easier for now, and the levels can always be added later.

With the semester coming to a close, we've had to revise our goals somewhat. We hope to have a small sample set completed and imported into Archon (somehow), along with a front-end search interface for delivery. But it will likely be more bare-bones than originally planned, given the Archon issues we're having. However, there is talk of Joanna and possibly myself continuing work on the project this summer, so there will be more time to do some fine-tuning.

Week 9: Making a Template

The past couple of weeks, we've been having regular work sessions with Jen. We're each working on encoding separate finding aids, and then comparing our work to catch errors and inconsistencies and answer each other's questions. This is very helpful because when Joanna and I first started doing markup we felt kind of lost and didn't know if we were doing it right. Since Jen has more experience, having her do the coding along with us seems to be speeding up the learning process. I feel much more comfortable now, due to her help as well as the amount of practice I've had since the beginning of the semester.

Joanna and I also finally got a draft done of that template we've been planning for so long. I'm sure it will end up being revised, but it's nice to know we have some form of completed document. Our work in the coming week will likely focus on tweaking the template.

Since my last post, we also had a meeting with DLS folk to go over the search/browse interface for delivering the finding aids on Archon. Sue, Linda, and Bryan will be in charge of making our design a reality. The meeting was surprisingly short; I expected there would be the need for some negotiation of our design, but Sue and Linda didn't see any problem with implementing our original idea. It will be interesting to see what they come up with.

Speaking of Archon, we also tried to import one of our completed EAD XML files into the program. Unfortunately, Archon didn't like that and wouldn't take the file. This is problematic, as the whole point of creating a template is so the resulting customized files can be uploaded directly to Archon. Sue and John Osborn are working on resolving the issue, so we're keeping our fingers crossed. We have a meeting scheduled for next week with John to discuss the problem.

Week 7: Fun With Photoshop

Joanna and I got really burned out on encoding. I worked on my Louis Noun finding aid on and off for weeks, and am still only halfway through it because the container lists take FOREVER to mark up by hand. Therefore, we took a break from that last week to work on other neglected tasks.

Specifically, we're focusing on designing the interface that will allow users to search and browse the finding aids. This will include simple keyword and advanced searching, as well as browsing by topic, subject, creator, collection title, collection date, and form/genre. We came up with a list of topical categories for browsing, and worked on mapping EAD elements to MARC record codes for controlled access elements.

We also created a screen shot in Photoshop. It was fun to do something purely creative for a change, but we seemed to be barking up the wrong tree (we were sure Jen would be blown away by our idea to use expandable boxes rather than drop-down menus, but she politely nixed that), so we'll be going back and overhauling the whole thing. That's ok though, because it's an iterative process, as we learned in seminar last semester.

Our next goal is to complete a sample set of finding aids from the three collections (ignoring the container lists for now), and bring those along with our search page ideas to a meeting with Sue and Bryan at the end of the week. They will be responsible for the actual programming, so we'd like to give them something to work with ASAP.