Unit 4

This week I am musing about Drupal and how applicable it is to my collection, or any collection for that matter. Drupal is very mutable and as such is good for creating collections of most types. The extra modules that can be downloaded are a bonus feature that greatly enhances Drupal's attractiveness. There are also themes and entire distributions that can be added to refine one's website and the collection's appeal. So far I have not experimented with downloading any of the extra features from drupal.org but I hope to play around with these features in the future. The ability to add users, roles, content types, categories/taxonomies, etc. help the creator, as well as the user, have a more personalized experience with website's created with Drupal. I look forward to learning more about these features and how to display my collection in the best light possible.

Unit 3

This week I am discussing the speed of the technical assignments given so far in my IRLS 675 course, Advanced Digital Collections. The first week we created a new virtual Ubuntu server and that was much easier than the times I had to do it last semester because I had already worked through all of the kinks and issues back then. I am very glad I took these two courses back to back. It has made some of the assignments much easier than they otherwise might have been with a break of a semester or a year in between. The second week I installed Jhove and it was rather smooth sailing. There were a few hiccups from not explicitly following directions but otherwise a very easy install. The only part I was a little confused about was during the last assignment of the install. I renamed a sample file with a different extension; I changed a jpeg to a txt file. I was a little confused at first because while looking through the sample file's source code information I noticed that almost everything was the same except it the file was no longer a jpeg. Even the MIME type still said image/jpeg. This was very interesting to me. During the third week I installed Drupal which I've never used before this course. It went okay until I got to page 20 of the Drupal Install and then I got hung up. I logged in as authuser as it said but was not able to add any content... maybe an article or a page. I will have to re-look. The directions said to create a story and I did not see an option for a story. I looked through the tutorials, the online help, etc and found nothing relating to stories. Maybe it meant just to create a story for the page I was to add... I also still need to go back in as caruser and create the four or five entries of a new content type. Overall the class started off easy but week 3 with the Drupal install has started making things more difficult due to its level of difficulty. Here's hoping I catch on (and up) quickly.

Unit 1

This week my group of digital objects is focused around bats. That's the furry animal, not the inanimate wood object used in a sporting game. They are all images I found on the internet. Some are of bat signs, some are maps to locations where bats can be found, some are illustrations, and yet others are book covers. I have been fascinated by bats for over 20 years. Back when I was younger I would have had a bat for a pet had it not been illegal. lol. The people who might access my account would be fellow Chiropterophiles who love researching about bats as much as I do. Some of the terms associated with my simple taxonomy might be bat, animal, microchiroptera, bird feeder, illustration, book, map, sign, etc.