Deeper into DSpace

This past week I've been working more with DSpace and getting deeper into configuring thumbnails and previews. Whereas Drupal had modules such as imagemagick, DSpace has the native ability to display thumbnails and previews, it just needs to be turned on in the configs. In the process of trying to accomplish this (I never did get thumbs and previews to work in DSpace), I spent a considerable amount of time trying to find support forums or other communities such as those available in Drupal, but with no luck. DSpace apparently has either very little community support or everyone who uses it is way smarter than I am and they just figure it out on their own. I am pretty sure I could eventually figure this out on my own, but what's the point, really? Why shouldn't we take advantage of the human impulse to share problems and solutions and thereby build relationships and support communities so that, someday, when someone has a problem that I know the answer to, I can reciprocate and tacitly ask them to "pay it forward."

One positive thing about having these "problems" with DSpace is that I am learning a lot more about how the application is structured and where various folders and files are located. I am also coming to love the Virtual Machine's ability to take snapshots at various stages of implementation. If I'm not sure about something that I'm doing, I readily take a quick snapshot and make notes about where I am in the installation process and what's next, so that I can backtrack to a spot before problems start showing up and re-install or configure as needed to problem solve until I understand what needs to be done to get things working properly.

I've enjoyed working with DSpace more than working with Drupal. I appreciate both programs, but the fundamental approach of DSpace appeals to me as I contemplate ways to preserve multiple files from the same master file. That and the ability to run checksums on the files to check for possible corruption seem like really critical functions in a digital archive.

Spent a lot more time with drupal - and I would need even more!

It seems like it has taken me forever to complete the assignments for Week 5. Not only did I attend the Biodiversity Informatics Workshop in Nairobi right as Week 5 was starting, but I also got sick on the way back from Nairobi and had a very unproductive week getting checked out. I'm almost back to full speed, but this week's installations and learning curve for all the settings that go with the installations has left me somewhat dazed, confused and stressed about trying to take it all in.

My overall impression is that drupal is very useful, but takes quite a bit of time and expertise to run well. It does not seem like a completely natural fit for a digital collection of photos, video and various text formats. It can be made to work for that, but since I haven't spent a lot of time working with it, my intuition would be to continue to search for other solutions that might be a more natural fit. On the other, hand, I would also want to do some research into the popularity of drupal compared to other solutions and also see how big and active the user communities are for an assortment of content management systems out there right now.

One example of where I'm at with drupal involves the installation of the lightbox2 module. It was certainly easy to install. I had no problem just basically downloading it and moving it to the modules folder in drupal. On the other hand, even though lightbox2 is installed and apparently running quite nicely, in order to actually use it, I need to modify some html for the links to images. I did a quick search in the drupal.org site and could not find any examples of how to do this. There are so many moving parts to drupal that I can't seem to determine where I would start looking for a way to add snippets of html to image links. So, I'm stuck for the time being. It would be nice to have better documentation for this kind of thing, but since the lightbox2 module is basically free, with the developer requesting some financial support to keep developing it, I don't expect to get support that way. Perhaps if I were better integrated into the drupal community, I would know where to turn.

So, I'm glad that I have spent so much time with drupal the past few weeks, but I'm also going to be interested in seeing what else is out there - I saw something about DSpace, I think. It should be interesting!

First evaluation of Drupal

The question this week is about how well drupal might meets my needs in producing an online digital collection. From this week's exercises, I am far from expert in this area - just a novice, really, so take it all with a grain of salt, just as I do right now. Still there are general impressions and it can be good to have fresh eyes looking at a situation or proposed solution for a problem such as this one.

Drupal is not hard to install at all. Once you have the basics figured out, one can get drupal running. I have not configured it to run connected to the internet, but I'm hoping that would not be too difficult. On the other hand, I find the interface to be pretty clunky compared to what I am used to using in terms of software. You have to know where you are going and what you are doing or you may not get there or get it done. It would be nice to have something like an inspector window that allows easier navigation through the drupal features and interfaces. It isn't really that hard to do things, but I don't like having to click back and forth - in and out to do things that are within the context of the window I'm currently in.

As far as displaying digital images, drupal surprised me by not choking on some of the file formats I threw at it. It handled my DNG RAW format fairly well. It didn't know to rotate the preview, which is actually an embedded JPEG, but that's no big deal, really. I think that imageMagic or some other plugin could take care of that problem. It did get to be a hassle to have to add various common image formats to the list of importable items, but I suppose once you got the hang of that, you could always anticipate it ahead of time.

It does seem that there are so many easy ways to display galleries of images out there though. I wonder if there might be better Content Management Systems that have taken a cue from such gallery software available from Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, et al. If not, I think there should be. I've brought up the topic of being able to leverage the embedded metadata in images for use in these galleries before and I'll beat the drum again. The model of having to move metadata around separately from the image files themselves just strikes me as primitive and inefficient. Something I'm going to have to look into a lot more, I suppose.