D-Space Assignment Issues and Thoughts

LC Tissandier Collection and OAI-PMH Collection Issues

The items I decided to include in my “LC-Tissandier Collection” on D-Space I essentially chose at random based on how the images caught my eye. The two items I chose had some of the metadata fields readily apparent based on the information on the LC catalog. But some of the fields that D-Space requested were different than what LC listed, or were at least not listed as separate fields in LC. I noticed that the OAI-PMH Collection described fields using different language than I used, and that some of the information was redundant. As part of the item description field it points users to the title, which has already been listed above. And a minor difference was that the language abbreviation for French was listed in my manual metadata as “fr” as opposed to “fre” in the OAI-PMH collection. The OAI-PMH record also does not list the author at all, just the publisher of the item. I suppose I made an assumption that an automated data harvest would not make, I assigned authorship to Albert Tissandier even though it is only implied instead of being explicitly stated. For both items there was also no abstract listed by the automated harvest, this is once again understandable since the LC website does not offer an abstract for these items like D-Space asked for. I constructed my own abstract, and the harvested data set would not be able to take the “initiative” do something like that.

OAI-ORE Struggle

The issues faced with the OAI-ORE collection were different than the other two collections. The first online collection we attempted to harvest from would not allow access, I attempted the harvesting operation several times but I would only receive an error message. The second collection also caused a few difficulties but eventually worked. I did wonder when I was attempting these harvests, which I believe I attempted at least ten times between the two collections, if it would have been easier and more efficient to construct the records manually. Being dependent on an external server can cause quite a few headaches, and it was instructive to have those problems manifested in a “low-stakes” class assignment rather than for an important project later on. If I’m ever in the situation again where I need an external server to provide a service like this to me, I know that I will need to allow ample to time for the possible technical shortcomings.

As far as the actual items in the OAi-ORE collection, I did notice that like the OAI-PMH and the manual LC collections the fields were fairly consistent within the collection. However the OAI-ORE items have a redundancy at the top with the date of the item listed three times with identical information. I’m unclear of what the purpose of this would be, and I imagine a human entering this information would have just not listed the others. An automated program like this obviously wouldn’t recognize a redundant set of information the same way a human would. Even with this redundant information, the fields overall are quite clear as far as giving the user detailed information. This OAI harvesting in both collections it seems can be a very useful tool, as long as the technology cooperates.

Making Your Posts Appear Seperate From Your Home Page On Wordpress

Another feature I had to figure out was how to move my “Blog” page, away from my home page. That is I wanted the page where my posts appeared to not be the home page, but I different page labeled as being the “Blog.” The way I figured out how to do this was to create a different “Home” page and add it to my “Custom Menu.” Create a “Blog” page, and add that to my custom menu. Then I changed my settings on the dashboard to make “Home” my default home page, and make “Blog” the place where my posts appeared.

Custom Menus on Wordpress

One feature of Wordpress that I learned from this assignment was how to build a “Custom Menu.” I had my various pages in the wrong order and had to play around with what order to put them in. The tool is pretty intuitive once you get started, you essentially just name a menu, add all of your pages to it, and then adjust the order by dragging the page names to their desired location.

Wordpress "Bright Page"

I have decided on “Brightpage 1.5” which isn't as dynamic as “Sliding Door,” but had a clean look with minimal tweaking. One major problem, which was only major because I didn’t notice it right away, was that it didn’t include my “Meta” widget and I was not able to log back in to the site without some distress. Of course if I had been more observant then that wouldn’t have been a problem.

Wordpress "Sliding Door" 2.6.1 Theme

I’m not a big fan of the default theme for building a Wordpress webpage. I think it looks fine for building a blog, but looks to “bloggy” to fit build a library webpage around. After doing some investigating I found a few themes that looked like thhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifey could be clean, neat, and functional. “Sliding Door 2.6.1” was a theme that I thought had the most potential, and it probably would if I had enough time to tweak the color scheme and play around with the dynamic sliding menu at the top of the page. After tweaking it for an hour or so I decided that the quirks of this theme were causing me too many problems. If I had unlimited time/money to build a site with this theme, I could potentially have made a very attractive website. But for the purposes of this assignment it wasn’t looking good enough to satisfy me, and the modifications were going to take up too much time.

Don Draper's Facebook Pitch

Scene re-edited from the season 1 Mad Men episode "The Wheel." In the original scene Don Draper (Jon Hamm) is making a pitch to Kodak for their new product, The Carousel. This spoof digitally replaces Don's analog slide show pictures with Facebook photos from their new "time-line" platform:

QR Codes

Robin Ashford's article, as well as the other related readings this week, on QR codes brings up an interesting idea for adapting libraries and museums to benefit "mobile" users. These articles state that the codes can be used to supplement exhibits, or lead users to where they need to go in the stacks without being troubled to copy down a call number. I think that QR codes are a useful tool that libraries and museums should not be afraid of, but I hardly think that they are a game changer.

Many people have smart phones that have mobile web. But I would think that the majority of users do not and will not until "standard" or "old fashioned" cell phones become completely obsolete. Or when smart phones and their data plans become affordable for the average customer. Cell phones are ubiquitous, but the majority of users do not have QR compliant smart phones that can read the codes, and also access mobile web to take the user to the website, photograph, resource, etc.

If your library is going to embrace all new technologies than by all means utilize QR codes and other similar technology. But it is important to not let your accommodation of the small percentage of your users that have smart phones to interfere with your ability to provide services to others without access to this technology.

Many people who visit the library everyday are doing it for internet and computer access. These users may have cell phones, but if they cannot afford the cost of having a computer and internet access at home they are unlikely to be able to afford keeping up monthly smart phone data plans which are typically higher cost than low speed wired access at home.

QR codes are a great new technology that has many exciting possibilities. But libraries should not get ahead of themselves implementing new technology that the majority of their users do not have access to.