Plans & Planning

A fellow student mentioned the complexity of technology planning in her blog post for the "Planning for Technology" unit. I certainly agree. As a worker-bee, my only involvement in planning, be it technological, budget, or strategic is rather after-the-fact. Or in that management effort to include the staff as 'stakeholders.'

Be all that as it may, planning of this complexity is not my nature. I hope to be eased into planning responsibilities of librarianship, and that the theory I've learned isn't lost in the politics or special interests of those at the helm. I'm encouraged that there is a wealth of information and assistance for technology planning.

Now nearly four weeks after I read the articles, I recall being amused, amazed, and overwhelmed at various readings. I randomly reopened a couple tonight to refresh my memory. In these latest days with talks of deep budget cut scenarios, Stephens' words, "Meet the Mission" echo loudly in my head. If there was ever a time and place for technolust it is long past, far away, or never to be seen again. Even though his quote from Sandra Nelson's book is now a decade old, her advice to review monthly is almost too close to semi-annual budget reductions for comfort.

Perhaps the reading I liked best was Gerding & MacKellar's very practical Applying for Technology Grants (Computers in Libraries, Jul/Aug 2006, pp. 7-8, 545-60). The advice seems sound, echos similar comments from other readings, crosses types of libraries, and provides additional resource recommendations that I thought would be quited helpful in actually producing technology plans and pursuing grant or other funding.

what's the word?

Surely there's a specific (sailing) term for the phrase having the wind knocked out of your sails, but I can't find or recall what it might be.

Regardless, I hope I'm the only one struggling with finding the enthusiasm to complete the coursework...

"If it's not one thing, it's your mother."

It's been great meeting and interacting with all of you this summer. My entire MLIS was taken in online courses, and this was the most enjoyable of any online course I've ever taken, with regard to the interaction for the assignments, with all of you, and with Dr. Fulton. I have been praising the program and the setup to whomever will listen all summer.

Hope to "see" you all again someday.

Reflection on the Path Traveled

When I began this course, I was familiar with Linux only as an alternative to Windows as an operating system. Having become comfortable with the Microsoft product line over many years, and not having suffered too many problems with it, I have always been content to stay put, as it were, and not bother learning something (else) new… on my own (which is pretty much how I learned what I know about computers, operating systems and software).

In beginning this program in digital information management, I’m not sure I realized I would be ‘elbow-deep’ in the command-line interfaces again, but it was a comfortable feeling based on my past success with MS-DOS. I have also been motivated by the hope that learning to function in the SQL and PHP environment will help me finally know how to better utilize the platforms associated with the hosting service for my own website(s). All I need now is that elusive factor, time, to experiment with SQL & PHP on my own.

My perspective of digital information has been expanded through the past 11 weeks of this course. I have always been, and continue to be, amazed at the information that is available via the Internet and the World Wide Web. So much of this content is collaborative and donated and circulated… truly mind-boggling. And yet, the average user is completely unaware of the vastness, and the usefulness of it all.

I love books. I love the idea of being a librarian and all that entails, from reader’s advisory to technical researcher to data quality management – however, I do like the term “information specialist” for its connotation that my knowledge and expertise will be beyond the shelf list, beyond the building, and beyond Google.

SQL !=

ETA (7:14PM) So, the reason the queries did not return the results I expected is that I did not correctly identify the columns which needed to be used by MySQL.

Queries should have been:

SELECT collection_title, image_title FROM collection LEFT JOIN image ON collection.collection_id = image.collection_id;

SELECT image_title, collection_title FROM image LEFT JOIN collection ON image.collection_id=collection.collection_id;

The exercises for the last two units using SQL have been relatively easy to learn and use. However, I know I do not completely understand JOIN because although I was able to create queries which produce results, they were not the results I expected, and I'm not yet sure why. I'll be looking at it again later today in order to have queries to submit for the assignment, but I'll post here the ones I first did, then follow with the query which gave me the results I was looking for (which was not a JOIN query).

SELECT collection_title, image_title FROM collection LEFT JOIN image ON collection.collection_id = image.image_id;




SELECT image_title, collection_title FROM image LEFT JOIN collection ON image.image_id=collection.collection_id;




Here's what I was trying to get:




And here is the query used:

SELECT image_title , collection_title FROM image , collection WHERE image.collection_id = collection.collection_id ORDER BY collection_title;

So, as I said, I haven't quite got the idea of JOIN yet.

Dazed and Confused

Unfortunately, as I struggle to find time to get all the reading and assignments completed, the material is (for me) becoming more difficult to fully understand.
In the current unit (9), it isn't the command-line tasks, but the modeling, normalization and ERD that are the problem this week. Basics of each area are fairly clear. The more complex ideas, like "concectivity" and "cardinality," how to follow the directionality of the ERD, the resolution of the many-to-many relatioship, concatenated primary keys.... I'm feeling rather lost.
I think that continued exposure to the material, review of the tutorials, and some hands-on experience with the practical use of the concepts will help clarify my understanding. At least, I hope so!

More Alphabet Soup

And now I'm feeling a bit out of my depth.

XML is not an unfamiliar acronym, neither is its meaning, or what it looks like; but what it does and where/how it works isn't yet particularly clear. However, I know that we are being taken logically, step-by-step through a process -- as I've read how others have struggled with things that have been easier for me, I've known that they will 'get it' in time and are just expecting to understand all at once.

So, even though I understand the syntax presented in the tutorials on XML and don't know yet how to apply it to the management of digital collections.... I know that all will (should?) become clear in time. One step at a time, just like Linux, just like HTML.

Following the glowing remarks by classmates about the VTC tutorial by Mark Long, I chose to work through the beginning sections of that first. Thorough, understandable, and more than sufficient to create the XML document for the assignment -- at least I hope so! Never one to try to reinvent the wheel, I took a stroll through the digital collections webpages of my home university library. Within the Advanced Search options was a drop-down menu of all the fields. I selected the subelements for my data elements from these fields (which somewhat correspond to MARC fields).

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!-- Holding type can also be identified by first portion of id, e.g., "0001" are documents; "0002" are illustrations; "0003" are sound recordings. -->
<images>
<holding id="00001-379">
<title>The Birth of Venus</title>
<creator>Botticelli, Sandro</creator>
<type>Lithograph</type>
<subject>Goddesses, Roman</subject>
<time_period>15th Century</time_period>
<collection>Art Education</collection>
</holding>
<holding id="00002-115">
<title>Los Gatos Black</title>
<creator>Morales, Yuyi</creator>
<type>Illustration</type>
<language>Spanish</language>
<source>Los Gatos Black on Halloween</source>
<collection>Children's Literature</collection>
</holding>
<holding id="00003-411">
<title>French Resistance: a Diary</title>
<creator>Girard, Marie</creator>
<type>Sound recording</type>
<language>French</language>
<subject>World War II</subject>
<time_period>20th Century</time_period>
<collection>Oral Histories</collection>
</holding>
</images>

HTML &me;

I've pretty much learned HTML on my own, though not taking a formal class wasn't for lack of trying. I approached my local community college about 10 years ago and -- believe it or not -- the respsonse was, "What???"

Between friends and online assistance, like WebMonkey, and checking out source code, I've usually been able to make my pages look how I want them to look. I started with Geocities in 1996, using their online text editor and also Netscape 3.04 Gold's editor off-line. Guess I'll be moving all that to another server sometime soon; I see Yahoo! is going to shut down GeoCities.

I finally jumped on the blog-wagon in late 2003 with Blogger. Though I never learned any scripting, or how to create CSS, I could use the templates and then edit to my heart's (and the extent of my knowledge or trial-and-error) content. The most frustrating thing now is that I do not have enough knowledge to work in the new templates, so I'm stuck (for now) with the widget templates.

About two years ago I set up a domain, installed the free WordPress, but unfortunately have not had time to really learn all I need to know to work easily in that environment. I hope to have time soon to do that. Having it does provide me space for photos and files... and actually, I think I remember I have already copied all the GeoCities files there -- but the work up updating all the links will take *SO* much time!

I'm glad to have the links to more advanced coding tutorials provided in the unit lecture and assignments this week. Even paging through the basics, I learned things (like in the future certain tags will require closing tags that haven't needed them in the past -- so I'm closing my paragraph tags in this post), so I plan to keep working through the tutorials.

I like to work in code rather than WYSIWYG. It's like knowing a secret, akin to working on the command line versus working with the GUI.