Unit 4: Drupal and my collection

Drupal is somewhat suitable for my collection. As we have learned, Drupal is very customizable. While writing out all the necessary categories and refinements to accurately describe my collection took time, I really like the dropdown controlled vocabulary menu, and once the work of creating the framework is done, entering the collection items themselves is not too time consuming.

I think that the customizability of Drupal makes it a great choice for unusual digital collections that don’t fit the traditional Dublin Core Metadata Elements or that aren’t suited to the text-heavy item records that some collection management systems use. Since Drupal is open source, anyone can develop modules to customize the system to their needs. Luckily, you don’t need to be a programmer to customize Drupal—many useful modules already exist. According to the discussion posts by my fellow classmates, there are modules for Drupal that allow you to create an image gallery, to play videos or sound clips, and for almost any other task you can imagine.

A weakness of Drupal is that since it is primarily a web development content management system, it does not have a focus on preserving the resources stored within a Drupal digital collection. 

I also felt like Drupal had a pretty pronounced learning curve. Much like the case study of implementing a web CMS I looked at in Unit 2, I felt like I had plenty of information about installing Drupal, but to actually learn Drupal I would need more time to poke around and figure out how things work for my specific needs.

I have seen some Drupal sites that are very visually appealing. However, the initial build of Drupal looks pretty blog-ish and simple, even when a different theme is installed. I think that there are some collection management systems we are going to look at that produce more “digital collection” looking pages automatically, instead of all the reconfiguring within menus and plugins I would have to mess with to get Drupal to look how I want it to look for my collection.

Some criteria that I think are important for evaluating a CMS are: whether or not it is open source, what kind of support is there for users (both paid services and more informal community services on forums), is the community active, how does the resulting digital collection look to users, how easy is the CMS to use as an administrator, and is the CMS preserving the materials it stores.