In(di)gestion

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?