Consistency? What's that?

I absolutely love, love, love metadata. For whatever reason, assigning names, subjects, dates, and the rest makes my heart go pitter-patter.

The problem? I'm a bit over-analytical. Sometimes you can really think yourself into a hole when decided how to organize things.

At first I tried to apply metadata similar to the way The Arizona Memory Project has done. The problem, though, is with my collection, that wasn't a great fit. I need to be able to say, for example, "What kind" of hero the object is about, for example, "real-life," or "comic-book." Those aren't normal subject headings. I did also try to use the LCSH as much as possible in Drupal and DSpace. In these two CMS, we can enter the subjects free-hand, so I was able to do that. With EPrints, you select from previously supplied subject terms. I had originally thought I was going to be able to use LCSH and the Name Authorities, but I misread: EPrints had the LC Classification previously installed. That was absolutely incompatible with my collection! The closest I could get to assigning a subject to the song "The Ballad of Paladin," for example, was History-- United States. That narrows it down.

So with EPrints I went back to some of the items, such as Type of Hero, that I created in Drupal (used in addition to the free-hand). So, I guess I'm sort of consistent (which doesn't sound very consistent at all).

The best part is, though, I feel as though I'm getting a little better at devising taxonomy each time I try. And it's still F-U-N!!

Drupal for Heroes?

I've got five items uploaded to my website.They're described per the metadata profile that I set up. (Which took way longer than I thought... isn't that always the way?) I'm honestly not sure yet if Drupal is right for my collection. I think I want users to be able to create their own hero page-- by that I mean, select objects from those I have on the website and have them appear on their own pages. So they create a mini-collection. Maybe Drupal can do this; I don't really know.

I am getting to understand Drupal a little better. I had worked with it previously and thought it was HORRIBLE but I didn't really understand that it is a content management system, not just a "website." I'm liking it much better now and do find it more intuitive, once I knew what I was dealing with. However, there is still a very negative aspect to Drupal. Whenever I hear that word, Drupal, this image pops into my head:

It's Droppo from the stupidest movie in the history of mankind: Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. As you might guess, that is no hyperbole. So pity me and despise Droppo for what he has done to me.

We last left our intrepid heroine on the brink of disaster, lost in Linux's Labyrinth, a sinister lair riddled with rabid daemons, ports to nowhere, and sockets with jaws of steel. In search of her companion, Apache Web Server, our plucky heroine must battle the evil forces that threaten sudo shutdown at every turn...





If our heroine had directions, written in HTML, to help her navigate the treacherous labyrinth, it might look like this -->

She wouldn't make it past port 22 with that bit of unhelpful information. Our heroine would have to make her best guess as to which port is that port, where is there and what thing is that thing. The HTML jacks up her adrenaline with all the bold and the italics and the large font, but that's about it.



Our heroine would do much better with directions written in XML, because metadata is included within the document itself. Should she want to know which port to avoid, well, it's

Luckily for her, our heroine had previously taken two courses which helped prepare her to understand XML: Organization of Information followed by Cataloging. Her cataloging instructor spent a couple weeks exposing the class to XML and working with it a bit. She was able to reread those sections in Lois Chan's Cataloging and Classification in order to remind herself what she had previously learned.

This is not to say our heroine remembered everything from the cataloging course. As a visual learner, and one who usually learns better through a person than an inanimate object such as text, she used Mark Long's lecture series in UA CBT almost exclusively. Mark Long's lecture is pretty good, because he explains what he's talking about as opposed to merely reading the slides.

As an adventurer, and one who is fond of derring-do, our heroine attempted to learn more about XSLT through w3schools. After perusing through that, and HTTP Request, and XPath, our heroine determined that the best use of her time was to prepare for her work with Apache Server. (Never fear! Our heroine has not been defeated by XSLT, much like the Swamp Fox of the American Revolution, she's run away to fight again!)

And so, our heroine reviewed the basics of what she had learned last semester, and solidified her understanding of what XML can be used for, and dabbled a bit in more advanced XML-- mostly via video, with a dash of w3schools thrown in. 

She felt confident in her basic understanding of XML, ready to tackle the dangers of Linux's Labryinth! Stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion to our story: "XML Marks the Node;" or "XARGS: Revenge of the Gnomes."