I have been treating my experience with each new website we
have tried as an audition for the final project. This means that while it is
important to consider which site is the best overall (most user friendly, most
attractive, easiest to customize, etc), it is even more important to consider
which fits my project the best. The site that I like the most might not be the
best site for hosting my collection. Clearly, all of the sites that we’ve
looked at have specific uses that suit them better than others. I can see the
value in each of the resources we’ve examined this semester.
For example, I liked DSpace better than Drupal. I thought
DSpace made sense, it was relatively easy to navigate, and it was great for
hosting documents. However, my collection is made up of more than just
documents—I also have images and audio files. After using Omeka this week, I
feel like it is a better fit for my collection than DSpace. But then, thinking
back to the beginning of the semester, Drupal is so customizable that it can
really host any type of collection, so saying that Omeka is the best site to
host my collection isn’t necessarily true. I think I just like Omeka because a
lot of the work (such as adding Dublin Core metadata elements) has already been
done for me, which makes importing items easy. Plus, I like to look and feel of
Omeka more than any other hosting site we’ve used—it feels much more clean,
organized, and modern.
I’ve already talked a bit about Omkea, so I think I’ll go in
reverse chronological order to discuss the other sites. So, the EPrints
harvester was an interesting resource. I have seen federated collections
before, but I hadn’t ever given much thought as to how the collections were
brought together. As many of my classmates said on the forum, it seems like
making your archive harvestable was trendy a few years ago but has largely
tapered off. I didn’t have any trouble with the harvester, and I thought the
resulting collection was decent—very browseable, relatively searchable, and not
too ugly or outdated looking.
Eprints itself was kind of a mixed bag—I didn’t hate it but
I didn’t love it. Eprints was great for the few academic journal articles
housed in my collection. The whole broken subjects aspect soured the Eprints
experience for me—it was such a chore to enter even one item, and the resulting
collection was missing an important part of metadata. I can imagine that
Eprints is pretty decent when everything is working, but the resulting site is
not as aesthetically pleasing or as intuitive as Omeka’s.
Dspace was pretty middle-of-the-road for me. I can see why a
lot of universities use Dspace—it’s good with metadata and preservation, both
of which are essential to institutional repositories. I thought Dspace was a
bit less user friendly than Drupal, but it did fit the needs of my
academically-focused collection with less effort on my part than Drupal. Before
working with Eprints and Omeka, I thought Dspace was a contender for my final
project.
I didn’t like Jhove—at the time I didn’t really understand
what it was or why we were using it. One of the PDF’s I put into Jhove
generated pages and pages of nonsense… Writing this post has made me realize I
need to look at Jhove again so I can talk better about it for the final
project.
Drupal is like a sandbox—everything is customizable, there
are tons of cool add ons and things to play with, but you have to figure out
the menu system before you can really play. While using Drupal I often got the
feeling I know there is a way to do this,
but I don’t remember where it is in the menu, which lead to lots of
searching and guide reading. I imagine that people who are comfortable in
Drupal like it, and I have no doubt that Drupal can create good digital
collections, but I think there are better options to host my collection.
So at this point in time, its looking like I’m going to
choose Omeka. We’ll see if working more with Omeka next week changes my
perception at all.
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