Unit 9--My SQL and Databases

I enjoyed learning more about MySQL this week. I know that many databases are created in some variation of MySQL, so it was really cool to work firsthand with this complex program. I couldn’t help comparing this weeks exercises with the database project I did in IRLS 515. In that project, we had to make a relatively complex relational database in Microsoft Access.

There is definitely a difference between working in MySQL and working with a GUI-based database program like Microsoft Access. At this point, I prefer Access because all of the different options are visible for me to select, I don’t have to worry about remembering how to name or access something using the command line. Access will remind users the difference between an integer column and a blob column, with MySQL the user is responsible for knowing the difference. Inserting data and moving data around in Access is so easy… I can imagine that MySQL has the opportunity to be more powerful and elegant to manage, but right now its just intimidating because I keep worrying I'll forget something.

I thought that the Joshua Mostafa MySQL videos from the UA CBT site were good tutorials. Sometimes I felt like they dragged, but usually he provided just the right amount of information to have the tutorial make sense without being overwhelming. At other times I felt like he was needlessly withholding information, like why not just say that “char” means “character”? Then he could have explained why specifying character length is important without having users go through the exercise of entering a multi-character piece of data and having it not work.

As a visual learner, I had difficulty remembering that the parenthesis looks like a “<” in the CBT videos. I kept getting syntax errors because I was using < and > instead of ( and ). I found a good MySQL cheat sheet (http://cse.unl.edu/~sscott/ShowFiles/SQL/CheatSheet/SQLCheatSheet.html) so that helped me remember the parentheses. 

I think I will review the CBT videos again and look over the W3 Schools advanced tutorials before moving on for next week. The great thing about MySQL is that it is used so ubiquitously, there are loads of tutorials about it and its various flavors. 

Unit 8--Technology Planning

I thought that the wide variety of readings about technology plans this week were interesting and provided an adequate background for the challenges of technological planning in a variety of different library settings. One small complaint for me personally was that I felt like there weren’t a lot of articles about technology planning in a university library environment. I am guessing this is because university libraries already have to engage in strategic planning and technology planning, while public and school libraries only have to do it if they are seeking LSTA funding. So there would naturally be more articles about how public libraries can get more involved in technology planning, because it’s something they might not already be doing.

My favorite introductory article from this week was Stephens “Technoplans vs. Technolust.” His emphasis on the importance of staff buy in for plans and the idea that plans should be living documents that changes as technologies and priorities change are just good sense for all types of information organizations. The most important take home point from Stephens was that planning for technology with users in mind is the best way to avoid technolust. That seems easy enough to accomplish, but I can imagine that reminding an over-excited technophile administrator of the actual needs/wants/behaviors of users could be quite difficult. This is one advantage of the current “big data” craze—now it is easier than ever to gather evidence about user wants and behaviors.

Part of me thinks that technology plans are a bit redundant—most of this stuff should be mentioned in a strategic plan.  For instance, in the ALA strategic plan we read, technology was a way of accomplishing almost every goal that was mentioned. Technology is not separate from any operation of a library anymore. I thought that this quote from Schuyler was especially well-put: “Technology is not a result; it is an enabler. A library that has truly integrated technology into its operations needs to separate plan because technology is incorporated into every other planning document it has” (Schuyler 54).  I also liked Schuyler’s idea of peer review for technology plans (55). He’s right that really only the systems librarians and IT people are capable of appreciating the content of these plans anyway—an annual conference where plans are shared might help develop some best practices and disseminate new ideas.

I do see myself somewhat involved with technology planning activities in my future because I want to work in an academic library and would like to eventually work in library administration. So all types of strategic planning are interesting to me, especially seeing how it gets accomplished at huge institutions with millions of dollars to spend.  It has been mentioned in this course and in the previous IT course I took (571) that the most important thing is just to have an awareness of how networks and other technologies work in order to facilitate communications with more specialized professionals. I feel like I will use my knowledge gained in this course in the future.

Related to institutional planning, I was interested in Chabrow’s idea of “failing fast”, or not keeping putting money into projects that aren’t working. Instead, thinking smaller and more modularly so that projects can be updated and changed without scrapping the whole thing. While Chabrow was talking about the IRS, the idea of modular pieces made me think of NARA. From Thibodeau’s original proposal, it seemed like a huge NARA digital repository was never going to happen. However, I read a bit more about it in 673, and the modular way that the different aspects of the repository are being constructed makes this huge project seem achievable.

Unit 7—XML

Since I took IRLS 515 last semester, working with XML is a review for me. In 515 we had to create our own XML schemas, and then describe a few different items using the schemas. This class will be my first experience combining XML with HTML. I knew that XML and HTML worked together, but I didn’t have the experience of adding XML to a webpage in my 515 class.

The W3 schools XML tutorials were my main resources for reviewing XML for this class. One thing that I missed in this set of tutorials was the lack of a chance to apply what I was learning. Since XML is for content instead of forming a document, you can’t see how changing tags changes how something looks like in HTML. I did like the trick of viewing an XML document in a webpage in order to make sure the XML tree is well formed. I went through all the basic steps and took a look at the “XML in real life” part of the advanced section (http://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_real_life.asp). It was interesting to see how XML can be used to convey news headlines and weather information to a variety of programs that can display it.

I also looked at the “Just enough XML to survive” video. I found this video to be a good review of the extremely basic XML formatting concepts. I also enjoyed the Irish accent of the video narrator. I did not get around to watching the much longer 504 lecture on XML this week.

The sample XML file (books.xml: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms762271(VS.85).aspx) was very helpful when it came to forming my XML document. I also enjoyed opening my XML document as a webpage in order to check the nesting of the elements.

I am not using a Raspberry Pi, but I am holding on to all course resources in case I want to work with one later.

Unit 6 Blog Assignment—HTML and Server Installation

HTML Experiences

I was already pretty familiar with HTML before this week’s assignment. The website assignment reminded me a lot of the 504 website assignment. I was proud to discover that I remembered how to create and upload the website from memory.

I looked through the IRLS 504 PowerPoint on HTML as a refresher. I read through many of the W3 Schools HTML tutorials. I also looked at the W3 HTML 5 and CSS tutorials. I found the CSS one particularly interesting because I have never written a style sheet manually before. I think the W3 Schools tutorials are some of the best available for HTML. I think they provide just enough information to make sense of what you’re doing without overwhelming a newbie with unnecessary background information. I also think their images of what your practices exercises should look like are helpful.

I want to mention a resource that I really love when working on HTML projects—Mozilla’s Thimble (https://thimble.webmaker.org/) . Thimble is cool because it is a real-time HTML translator. I found myself doing the W3 tutorials on Thimble rather than on their “Try it Yourself” HTML writing areas. In general, I find writing HTML code to be fun and relaxing. I like the way that the tags nest in a document and that it is relatively simple to memorize the most common tags. Unlike working in the command line, I don’t have to look at a cheat sheet every 30 seconds to write HTML. I home that someday my facility with the command line will equal how comfortable I am with HTML.

Practice System Installation

            I’m not sure if I’m supposed to talk about this if I am not using the Raspberry Pi… However, I had enough memory on my computer to keep my VM server from the previous units, so I am using that as a backup for my new server.

            Installing the server from the Standard Install document was no trouble at all. I am excited to move on to the next steps for this project!