Unit 5 The benefits of TinyMCE

Here is an example of the way cool things TinyMCE can do. I copied some html code automatically generated by TinyMCE into my blog just to give the reader a flavor for the amazing functionality made possible by numerous third party modules installed and configured into Drupal. The professional looking text descriptive of Congress Park from a Wikipedia article that follows below is an example of how TinyMCE can help make blogs look better.

Congress Park is a 17-acre (6.9 ha) site in Saratoga Springs, New York, United States. It was the site of the former Congress Spring Bottling Plant and the former Congress Hall, a large resort hotel, which together brought Saratoga Springs international fame as a health spa and gambling site. At the peak of its popularity it was a place where the wealthy, major gamblers and stars of the entertainment world mingled. The park's artwork includes a statue by Daniel Chester French and a landscape design by Frederick Law Olmsted, among others.

It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1987^[2][3] after having originally been submitted and listed as the Casino-Congress Park-Circular Street Historic District in 1972. The later listing excluded some of the property outside the park and halved the overall size of the district.

Congress Park is currently operated by the City of Saratoga Springs as a park, bounded by Broadway, Spring Street, and Circular Street in Saratoga Springs.

Select and install a Drupal module of your choice.

I decided to install the SiteMap module site_map-6.x-2.1.tar.gz to my Drupal, since the site map feature is something I have always found useful on other web sites as a way to discover the contents of a web site. The install and configuration went well, and I configured it so even non-authenticated users/visitors to my collection web site will be able to use the site map feature. I inserted it into the navigation menu using Administer>Site building>Menus>Navigation

I believe the SiteMap module will make my collection easier to navigate but also in a real world context more discoverable by researchers as Site maps can improve search engine optimization of a site by making sure that all the pages can be found by search engine bots.

Unit Drupal suitable to my collection?

Drupal seems to be very suitable to my collection of Saratoga Springs digital objects. Because my collection is specific to one small geographic area, it is important that tags descriptive of specific persons, places and things be used to enable discovery. LCSH or other controlled vocabularly might be too high level to provide the specificity I would like to describe the digital objects in my collection. I like the flexibility that Drupal provides and its dynamic features, for example the way I can add a tag, hyperlink it, and then by clicking the hyperlink a new page is launched headed by that tag.

I could describe the songs or photographs in my collection with tags derived from the text of the song or some element descriptive of the photographic subject that likely would not be available in a controlled vocabularly like LCSH. For example I might add the word gambling as a tag to the word musical which might be more expressive than the LCSH heading Musical revues, comedies, etc.

The images of the many instances of mineral waters in and around Saratoga Springs might be tagged with words like geyser, spouter, fountain, springs each of which might be more expressive than labeling each photograph Springs--New York (State)--Saratoga Springs


As explained in the Unit 5 tech assignment “we will expand on this problem over the semester”

The data deluge continues, or I need a CMS to handle all this stuff

Please don't speed it up. I feel like someone trying to catch successively faster and more numerous tossed bean bags. It is all I can do to keep up. I understand there is much to cover and each activity and reading does add to my knowledge, but I don't think I'm retaining it too well.

The Drupal install was complicated but as time consuming and detailed as it was it was only the start of the tech activities this week. After that came the draft? construction of the Drupal website. Learning some introductory concepts about Drupal vocabulary and the associated hierachical arrangement of terms and subterms while it does reinforce and place in context our earlier readings by Shirky and Zeng, it is all becoming somewhat overwhelming. Layering all this on top of hours of tech readings, together with what amounts to a second class in digital collections management, plus numerous writing assignments, listening to podcasts and replying to the seemingly endless discussion posts from classmates, well ...

Despite the deluge of material and assignments, I'll continue to give it my best effort. The connection between MySQL and Drupal was the most instructive concept learned this week. Trying to locate my initial page and then grasping that rather than being located in a familiar static directory and subdirectory structure that Drupal instead dynamically recalls content from a database was a very important lesson.

Unit 2 CMS at Kent State

Library Hi Tech Vol 24 No. 1, 2006 “Building a local CMS at Kent State” by Rick Wiggins, Jeph Remley and Tom Klingler p69 -101

I selected the article cited above to read in full because I thought it would be an excellent opportunity to learn the operational details of a library CMS (Content Management System). I wasn't disappointed. The authors take the reader through a step by step process of building a CMS for library web development. The fundamental reason for implementing a CMS in the library environment is the recognition that a library's web site is a core service and that web development and maintenance is as equally important, complex and challenging as the work involved in operating the library's OPAC and ILS

The Kent State Libraries and Media Services web site team (LMS) found that there was a profound need to improve the structure and the integrity of the KS web site. The increasing number of pages, links, e-resources and user expectations made old processes and workflows obsolete. The old methods of updating and maintaining the web site were no longer sustainable. Scalability issues had overwhelmed web development and a radically different methodology was required to automate library web page content and metadata. Hence the need for a CMS.

To their credit, the LMS team included their core users , university staff, faculty and students as key participants in crafting a new web site which would be administered through the CMS. Focus groups and participant surveys generated feedback so that the KS LMS team didn't fall into the trap on relying exclusively upon the expertise and expectations of librarians.

A key moment in the development process was the conclusion by the LMS team that no open source or commercial CMS was available that would meet all the project's requirements. So the KS team developed their own CMS.

The largest part of the article provides in extraordinary detail the features and workflows of the KS CMS. I will spare the reader these details. However, as I reflected on this article, it became obvious to me that the KS CMS as described by the authors is very much a top down expert system. That is the CMS is completely dependent upon the expertise of the library staff. After its launch, the KS CMS doesn't include end users as active participants in the generation of content. A lot of what is described in the KS CMS project, while it would delight many librarians, I think generally runs counter to the philosophy articulated in last week's Clay Shirky reading.

To be fair the article was written in 2005 and published in 2006, light years ago in digital time, (yet Shirky's remarkable article was also written in 2005), well before social media became the dominant factor it is today. The KS article describes a CMS process that is a triumph of taxonomy and professional expertise. Folksonomy, and crowd sourcing are never mentioned as considerations, and personalization is only a vague hope requiring a new centralized authentication system. I think the authors would write a radically different article today.