Greetings from the borderlands of DSpace, where Rachel and I have been floating for the past week. Wish you were here!
After successfully digitizing dozens of documents, we turned eagerly to the "ingest" process--a.k.a. uploading digitized materials to their new forever home on the iSchool's digital repository. We gathered expert advice from Dr. Galloway about our organizational schema and consulted with students in her Problems in the Permanent Retention of Digital Records class about essential DSpace resources. We read through the DSpace manual and supporting documentation. We crossed our fingers and took deep breaths and practiced eating space food.
But we were still confused.
We decided we needed to see the ingest process in action before attempting it ourselves, so we talked with Sam, who suggested we talk with Sarah, who blessed us with several magical batch processing powers: the New Zealand Metadata Extraction tool and three marvelous perl scripts (which she originally received during her Problems project at the HRC), passed down through the DSpace generations like some elusive passcode.
Can we give Sarah a gold star for staying late with us in the IT lab to walk us through our first ingest pre-processing encounter? Despite the fact that she has this little dissertation thing to work on...
Once Sarah left, though, our luck ran out: we couldn't seem to launch the metadata extractor on the lab computers (something about missing Javascript), so we did what any NAS-space-hogging SOD student would do: we uploaded EVERYTHING to the network and prayed we'd be able to open the Extractor at home.
Fortunately, our dreams came true. The extractor launched beautifully on my laptop, and a few hurdles, several questions, one ActivePerl download--and about 8 hours of troubleshooting--later, all of our files are processed and waiting patiently on the NAS for the next chapter in their journey: ingest. We're hoping Sam (bless him!) will be available to walk us through these steps in the coming few days.
In the meantime, we're going to build the DSpace hierarchy according to our schema and get started on our reflection paper.
Updates to come, but for now, I'm a bit exhausted, so I'm going to pop a TUM for my in(di)gestion and try to get some DSleep.
p.s. We originally thought our hierarchy would look like this:
Sub-community: YEAR
Sub-sub community: Archives Week
Collection: YEAR Archives Week
Sub-sub community: Meeting Minutes
Collection: YEAR Meeting Minutes
Sub-sub community: Events
Collection: YEAR Events
Sub-sub community: Finances
Collection: YEAR Finances
Sub-sub community: Marketing
Collection: YEAR Marketing
Sub-sub community: Correspondence
Collection: YEAR Correspondence
Sub-sub community: Administrative Records
Collection: YEAR Administrative Records (includes Annual Reports?)
Then we decided it would look like this:
Sub-sub community: Events
Collection: YEAR
Collection: YEAR
Collection: YEAR...etc.
Sub-sub community: Finances
Collection: YEAR
Collection: YEAR
Collection: YEAR...etc.
And now we've decided it will look like this:
Sub community: SAA-UT Records
Collection: Administrative Records (including annual reports)
Collection: Meeting Minutes
Collection: Archives Week
Collection: Events
Collection: Finances
Collection: Marketing
Collection: Website
(with the years conveyed through the metadata)
Sub-sub community: Finances
Collection: YEAR
Collection: YEAR
Collection: YEAR...etc.
Questions to be resolved:
-which materials should have access restrictions, based on the Briscoe's and iSchool's policies, and the FERPA regulations?
