Unit 2: How To Disintermediate The Department of Redundancy Department

Beach, R., & Dial, M. (January 01, 2006). Building a collection development CMS on a shoe-string. Library Hi Tech, 24, 1, 115-125.

This article discusses the implementation of a collection development framework with a content management system (CMS) at a small (5,000 students) college library. The article is written by those that developed and implemented this system and is very practical as it is a report of "real world" problems, although the article ends with the future of this model at this institution in doubt.

The new system was an experiment in addressing faculty and student concerns as to the responsiveness of the library in purchasing faculty-requested materials and the paucity of the collection in terms of student needs. The article highlights the growing phenomenon of distance-learning and makes clear that in the future planners might do well to imagine every student to be a "distance learner." Doing this facilitates integration of campus (and beyond) computer networks and enhances the library experience of those students in residence as much as those at a distance.

The article addresses the challenges in modeling a collection development content management system that has buy-in from stakeholders, who are library staff, faculty and students. Faculty requests for materials to be purchased by the library are seen as the beginning of a process that, in the past, required many replicated tasks related to bibliographic data such as Baker & Taylor order forms and MARC records. The goal of the integration described by Beach and Dial is to utilize the initial request for purchase of materials by faculty as the basis for a record that is then further enhanced by the library's technical services department and, upon final purchase and accession, then becomes the catalog record.

Utilizing a CMS to enhance collection development (at this small college, at the time of this article's publication) for the small college in Texas that Beach and Dial describe is still in the experimental stages. The article notes that buy-in from faculty must be facilitated by outreach on the part of librarians and is absolutely critical to the success of this proposal. Faculty must know how and desire to use this new way of making materials requests.

Of interest also in this article is the point made by the authors that due to budget constraints and limited purchasing the year of the system's trial implementation, this created an opportunity to test the new idea in a less frenetic environment. Also, I found interesting that Beach and Dial note the reluctance of technical services staff to give up their paper processes, even though these older patterns of library acquisition were/are quite redundant and known to be so by the very people performing this redundant work.

IRLS 675: Unit 1: A Forming Digital Collection

Although the assignment says that we should use "15-20" objects as the core of our experimental digital collection, I am hoping to make a collection of nine paintings by Austin G. Ohm as photographed/digitized by R.P. Murphy. Both of these artists are friends of mine and Ohm's work appears as the permanent picture at the top of this blog (though this painting is not one of the nine, though it occurs to me that it could be the tenth!).

As these artists are relatively unknown, alive and still producing, I am hoping to make an accessible online database that the artists themselves can add to, refer others to, and allow the artists themselves to see the ease and power such an online presence can have on them and their audience.

I hope to make the work searchable by artist, size, value and title. It occurs to me that, as these are works new to the world for the most part, that searching will prove difficult unless I can think of something that the potential user might require. Perhaps there will be a manner in which I can allow users to tag the paintings? As the collection is so small, it seems obvious that one could simply click through all nine in a few seconds. Hmm, is this going to be the right collection? I could add other art works by the same artist but within other genres of art, i.e. he also makes sculptures and I know of a video or two that he has authored.

Unit 10 SQL!!

I am still having trouble with SQL and in some ways this has been where the course stopped for me and I lingered far too long. As I write this I am still working on writing my query assignment (like this blog, very late) for the Unit 10 drop box and I have taken far too long to ask for help.

Unfortunately for me, the two components remaining that I really needed to move along with the class on were SQL and PHP and I have been forced by my own situation to proceed on these without the course in some sense. It has taken me a long time to amass the resources that work for me concerning SQL. I found Mostafa difficult to understand on SQL but wonderfully lucid concerning PHP, for example.

Writing SQL queries is much easier for me I find if I sit for hours and enter them at the command line rather than sit for hours listening to Mostafa, writing down a query and then attempting to enter the query. I find that simply sitting and spinning the wheels as one would on a combination lock one has no idea the number of would do. I am learning about my style of learning. I am unsure sometimes within this course what I can and cannot neglect.

I feel as though I would rather have had more time and assignment concerning the command line instead of the planning units. One planning unit and then perhaps an extra week to try to get our PHP to work may have suited me better. But I loved the course and would not change a thing except that I could not change things in my own life that have been scheduled long ago.

Strangely, I studied SQL in IRLS515 and quite liked it. I was looking forward to having another go at it in this class and, as I read the syllabus as the beginning of this course, I thought this time might serve as a much valued second exposure to this obviously central topic to those creating or searching databases. But, ironically for me, the SQL portion of this course is where I fell of the horse and have been dragged by the stirrup ever since.

Unit 11 Learning Styles

If my undergrad was learning to learn, my master’s seems to have become learning to learn online, or learning to learn 2.0.

I am astonished to find in 672 that I am drawn to the practical so strongly in opposition to the theoretical, if I may toss these fuzzy terms into opposition for the sake of simple communication.

At the beginning of this course I had one week's exposure to HTML and MySQL, zero knowledge of the CLI and Linux, no knowledge of what the words "open source" really meant nor what a server was exactly, and, last but not least, was extremely nervous in general concerning technology. So, one can imagine what attempting to set up a demo system implementing the LAMP architecture has meant to some one like me, or can you?

Well, that is why I mention the practical in opposition to the theoretical above. I have been keeping learning style notes during this class and all was going well until some outside factors overwhelmed my life for a few weeks. I describe the learning flow previous to this as laminar and the result turbulence (hydrology metaphors concerning flows).

Laminar works great for the course style with me but any turbulence creates a situation where I feel as though I need to tweak the course to my personal circumstances. I was pleased by the sudden appearance of the last 4 or 5 units all at once in the final weeks of the course. This allowed me to attempt to recover from turbulence by adjustments, troubleshooting my learning methods and study habits ...

As I write this I am woefully behind so one can judge the success of my learning style in this course, but for delving into a topic I am so new to I feel that this course has been a success for me personally. Academically, I would be happy with a passing grade but I knew that my grades would probably take a hit by immersing myself in my own digital summer but I am very gratified by the results. I know, as Marisa Hudspeth mentioned today in one of the final discussion posts of the course when she referred to knowing what a "LAMP stack" was when one was mentioned at a meeting, that I have come such a long way. I can now ask even better questions at the 24/7 support center here on the U of A campus, for instance!

Unit 12 Value!

This is my post for Unit 12, the final unit of IRLS Applied Technology. I was struck during the reading concerning (technology) project planning this week by the difficulty of measuring what I have heard some economists refer to as "economic opportunity" cost (see Unit 8 blog post for more on this). That is, weighing into your calculations the cost of the opportunities occluded by implementing one plan path as opposed to another. In the reading for this Unit I was pleased to see librarians taking opportunity cost seriously in regards to digital collections. This seems especially important in light of the overwhelming need and the equally overwhelming lack of funding and resources to "get everything online" as fast and as best as we can. It should only take a couple decades or centuries or ... ?

In one article I read this week, I was impressed by the attempts to measure such intangibles as "significance" of a given collection of materials in an archive, though I know librarians and archivists do this all the time I had know idea the study of such processes could be refined so. The idea that planning must be transparent within a library setting and especially as concerns technology coincides nicely with my new understanding of open source protocols for development and implementation and why that is such a successful model, or why democracy is such a stable political system as opposed to others.

My own planning within this course has faltered of late and I am in the unusual position (for me) of playing catch up and I am afraid I am not so good at this. But, as we do in institutional and personal settings, we make plans and then--in the fog of life--we begin again and push forward.

Planning For?

The photo I've included with this week's post (I am late) is of the skeleton near the Information Services desk at the Arizona Health Sciences Library in Tucson, Arizona. It is real and is described in the catalog as an "Afro-Asiatic male approximately 40-50 years of age." This skeleton, frozen as it were in this glass case with a cable lock indecorously protecting it from necromaniacs against science, seems to me an apt analogy for the technology plans of libraries and other like public institutions.

Robert Dugan's article struck me this week (Dugan, R. E. (January 01, 2002). Information technology plans. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 28, 3, 152.). As I mentioned in class discussion, I lived through the great changes academic libraries have experienced in regards to the digital during the last decade or so and the rapid adoption of rather corporate positions on the part of management and administrations within my ken lingers in my memory. I was thrilled to see Dugan ask bluntly, "Has the acquisition and application of information technologies improved learning? " Too often have I seen and/or been a party to making technology decisions or planning with only staff and faculty work flows taken into account and the needs of users or students never considered. Budget restrictions lead to the underfunding of previous decisions, rendering the acumen of the past redundant, and Dugan asks "Have the costs associated with the technology been worth it? How do we know?"

Economists refer to something called "opportunity cost;" that is to say, what is the cost of doing something in terms of the lost opportunities to do something else. This hidden opportunity cost, seemingly inherent even within the best of technology plans, is the elusive measure of which Dugan speaks. If planning for technology is not done well failure of the attempted system is not likely the only or even the most harmful result. The waste, as alluded to in Eric Chabrow's article (Chabrow, E. (November 28, 2005). State of the Union it seems as if government IT projects are cleaned to fail.Information Week Manhasset-, 1066, 40-47.), can become so great and the obviously missed opportunities so egregious that fundamental confidence in an institution and its mission may be called into question by stakeholders. For institutions dependent upon public confidence such as libraries missed opportunities are missed chances to reinvigorate supporters, identify stakeholders and move forward with technology informing and informed by end users.

After examining technology plans this week such as the American Library Association's and that of the Nevada State Library, as examples, I have come to see the best technology plans as skeletal frameworks that provide both solidity and flexibility. A plan must be clear enough to work as a guide to action but not too rigid. The plan cannot be uselessly vague but too many particulars and we run the risk of running an entire institution down a technological cul de sac. I feel more empowered than ever before, by this class and others I have taken during my studies in librarianship, to speak up concerning issues of technology planning within institutions I am a member of. I feel that I have a better understanding, a better vocabulary and more wisdom than I did ten or twenty years ago. Although I have always been a stakeholder, I was not always able to perceive this and assert myself in an appropriate manner. I now feel better able to represent myself and others where libraries and technology planning are concerned.

B.A.W.

B.A.T.

XML and Dreamweaver

As I mentioned last post, I am new to Dreamweaver and this week I took my first plunge into writing XML with this Adobe application.

Writing XML still confuses me at present and, although I have found many tutorials that are more or less helpful for either XML or Dreamweaver, I have yet to find the right fit of the two as concerns my situation. So I continue to glark and glean what I can and troubleshoot my educational style as if it were a network to be configured (and constantly). At the University of Arizona CBT website I log in and find that there is Mark Long's "Introduction to XML" and James Gonzalez' over nine hour course on Adobe Dreamweaver CS4, both offer initial large chunks of insight for this larva. But, and it is a BIG "but" if you have only a week to learn to write XML and learn to navigate Dreamweaver, Long shows us XML on a PC using NotePad and Gonzalez gives us Dreamweaver for over nine hours but seems to have neglected XML (though I have yet to watch the full nine hours).

On YouTube, after entering "Dreamweaver" and "XML" I begin to find friends. I find many tutorials though I feel as if I am sometimes obsessed with my search for "the perfect tutorial." Is this what finally leads one to make a tutorial of his/her own? I find after many hours I can hobble together just enough to have something to hand in for my class assignment, something that displays in my web browser anyway, something created in Dreamweaver CS4 and saved to my desktop with a .xml extension.

Dreamweaver

This week I struggle with Dreamweaver attempting to create a simple web page and find I am a bicycle rider suddenly thrust behind the wheel of a Ferrari!

University of Arizona's Computer Based Testing (UACBT), I find, has 9.5 hours of Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 tutorials and, despite the simple results you can see here, I employ many tips from this series but find that I often fall back on the simple tips and the free Fugu that my instructor gives us as a baseline. For instance, one does not need Fugu when using Dreamweaver if one knows how to use the sFTP included in the software. I, however, fall back on the familiar and use Fugu after preparing my page in Dreamweaver, like driving your Ferrari to the store and taking a bike the last few streets!

Cat Naps and Learning

I include a photo with this post of my favorite study method: the cat nap. This week I studied networking and the networked environment of today's computer users. This post concerns learning materials as they relate to my own personal learning style.

Once, when I studied cancer and issues of epidemiology especially as related to questions of the law and liability, I had an epiphany about education, my own and others more generally.

Cancer is difficult to litigate when one seeks the cause of the cancer in the victim. Cancer's causation is multiple and time sensitive. Exposure to cancer-causing agents occurs in different time increments, at different ages and sensitivities of the victims, and different carcinogenic agents interact and produce unclear causation when lawyers seek to claim compensation for their clients. Cancer, to top it all off, is not so much a disease as a syndrome, a breakdown of normal body function that manifests suddenly after years of erosion within the body's cellular function. What is the cause of cancer? Multiple exposures to a multiplicity of carcinogens over extended periods of time and over various stages of human development.

Although a macabre analogy, this realization concerning cancer dovetailed perfectly with my conception of my own learning style. I do not know how I learn exactly. I expose myself to reading, video, audio, and write and speak in the form of notes and assignments. Some of these methods work better or worse at various times, and some do not seem to take or even seem a complete waste of time. However, I find the recall even of lessons badly learned can be astonishing and amazing. I catch education the way some people catch cancer, through multiple exposure to a variety of materials at different times of mood and day. This week I admit to barely understanding many of the larger issues connected with networking and this is my first exposure to an in-depth discussion of the topic. I plowed slowly through the readings and videos this week and wondered often if anything was sinking in. After a couple of cat naps in the summer heat of Tucson, I find I am ready to continue my exposure and look for signs of positive results although the real revelations are probably some years away.

Groups and Users

This week found me adding and manipulating Groups and Users in both my Ubuntu Linux distro that I have installed on my VM software on my Mac and on a remote desktop running at the University of Arizona where our class practices in what is dubbed the "Digital Sandbox." I used the CLI and Webmin on my Ubuntu server and was meant to compare and contrast the experience of the CLI versus the GUI. I found them both kind of fun, honestly, which is great as one of the primary goals for me of studying technology is to overcome apprehension and needless worry concerning all things electrical.

I also used a GUI on the remote desktop for the first time which was most interesting as I have only ever used the CLI on the remote desktop. Many of my fellow students have complained of the lag in the response in the remote connection and I think this (although it has had little impact on my own experience so far) exacerbated in the GUI. Perhaps there is a lesson in this? Is the CLI more responsive than a mouse-centric interface like a GUI over remote connections? I would have to say yes at this point which makes me again say with surprise that I am beginning to prefer the CLI in some situations. Especially situations that I can see myself working in, or just having fun in, in the future.

On another note, study of Linux has had some unexpected collateral benefits for this WordPress dog! After abandoning my WordPress blog about six months ago because I could not get a photo to upload, I again reengaged the problem the other day for no apparent reason. Immediately upon investigating the situation, I now realized that I understood much more about WordPress than I used to. I now understood, for example, what it really means that WordPress is open source for the first time. I went to help forums for help. I recognized, for the first time, a by now not wholly unfamiliar structure of directory name that had those familiar slash marks. And, last but not at all least, I have grown much more bold when it comes to seeking support (especially when you often have already paid for it!). So, after learning many great things and having quite a few a-ha moments, I got my blog just where I want it thanks to the support personnel at my friendly neighborhood web-hosting service. People this old dog was paying for the past three years and had never once called upon for help! Technology's bark is the shout of a dog yelling "Hello, friend!" and there isn't usually a bite, just like real dogs.

Becoming Larval

I enter my Ubuntu Linux system this week to configure the system using the text editor. I follow the assignment without always comprehending every input but with a growing awareness of what an operating system is and what configuring one means, it’s like changing the settings on an Atari or an iPhone. Only there’s this CLI instead of the GUI to which we’ve all grown accustomed, the mouse has been killed by the cat and the text editor is modal. (The one question I cannot answer correctly on this week’s quiz is in regards to which text editors are modal. Any help?). All my system configuring goes smoothly and, although I am new to the CLI and OS configuration at this level, I am reminded of all the devices that I have had to install or build in my life and I just follow the instructions and everything seems to work well.

I learn a number of funny terms this week such as the verb “to glark,” which means to learn something from context. And I learn from personal experience that a debbie can skip the newbie stage, proceed straight to larval hacker, and then decide by the length of facial and or other hair that one has reached the stage of hacker pure and simple. I’ve probably got at least ten years to go.

B.A.W.
B.A.T.

When is a remote desktop like a cat in the snow?

Accessing the remote Linux desktop this week for the first time I feel a sense of accomplishment as I employ a Virtual Network Computing application through a Virtual Private Network and begin exploring the command line interface. I do not spend much time on the remote desktop unfortunately as I run into problems with adjusting my screen resolution and find myself at the 24 computer support center on the University of Arizona campus at a very late hour. I will not alter my screen resolution through this portal for the rest of this semester.

The tutorials as created and provided by Bruce Fulton are lucid and very helpful in regards to setting up and connecting to the remote desktop. I also continue watching this week Arthur Griffith’s “Introduction to Linux” series and, while note-taking is advised, I find it hard to know just what is or is not noteworthy. As I am new to the CLI (command line interface), I am still swimming in information and just trying to keep mouth and nostrils pointed towards the air. Griffith is wonderful but for a newbie this stuff flies by and I find that I have to watch his lectures over and over until osmosis occurs.

I find that I am still searching for a sense of overall meaningfulness in what all these commands mean or lead to, and I admit to feeling a bit lost in Linux this week. I am hoping that more experience of the CLI on the remote desktop enables me to get the kind of reactions one expects from learning a new language, namely, a response like laughter or tears. I wait to make my audience respond significantly in this new language, even if the audience is a machine.

B.A.W.
B.A.T.

Ubuntu: Absolute Beginner Talk (for those ignorant of Linux and Bantu)

I began exploring the Ubuntu discussion pages at ubuntuforums.org within the “Absolute Beginner Talk” forum as befits my debutante status in regards to Linux. This debbie could not understand in any kind of plain English over 90% of the thread titles he then confronted. I immediately was attracted to the thread entitled “Completely LOST!” as I felt the same way.

As I read through the discussion thread beginning with a problem familiar to all Ubuntu users, namely an initial download of the .iso Ubuntu package, I began to enjoy the community of support for this open source endeavor aptly summed up by a quote appended to one of the participant’s posts:

“A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.” ~ Archbishop Desmond Tutu, 1999

After installing the .iso Ubuntu package myself (I’m currently awaiting further instructions), I feel relief at having landed in this forum as if by flight. The quick response, the selfless attitude towards service reminiscent of librarianship at its best, and the expertise of the Ubuntu crowd--in both a properly proffered panoply of pedagogy and the expected technical knowledge--are to be envied by anything in the private, for-profit sectors of our economy. As Archbishop Tutu and the participants at this forum remind me, sometimes the best available technology is human.

B.A.W. (best available wishes),
B.A.T.