It's been a long while

It's been a long while. I took a hiatus for the summer, focusing strictly on work, contemplating whether I want to continue this blog outside of the assignment for class, which was the original reason I started it.

I've decided I do want to keep it, though I don't know how useful my blog will necessarily be to IT people or to researchers of technical communication or rhetoric.

Then again, I think that a blog's subject matter relies much more on how much the author likes the sound of his/her own fingers typing thoughts than on how many readers s/he receives.

Things going on right now:
My digitization server is up and running DSpace. I'm planning to migrate all current digitized collections from the test server over to the production server this week. It's all running Postgresql, which seems to be sufficient for the requirements of this digitization process. DSpace itself installed fine, no problems, based on the documentation I'd created from the test server. I'm going to provide my documentation to the folks at the Law School here on campus because they are planning to run DSpace, as well.

I'm going to run Archivists' Toolkit on the production server soon. A select group of users and I have been testing it on my end and am happy with the results, so it's time to put it up and let my users work with it. Archivists' Toolkit, like a lot of open source software, is tremendously forward-thinking as far as how materials in archives should be managed, and I am very impressed by the tracking options available from this program. It uses MySql, so it's a fairly stable program, and users can connect to it on their computers relatively simply. Using AT, we can track every item that is accessioned, processed, and digitized, and track every step as it happens.

My next test project is to install Word Press on the test server. I have some faculty who are interested in blogging capabilities, and a few other users who would like to explore the possibility of creating a journal of place. I'm going to give them access to work with Word Press, and if it is sufficient for their needs, I'll install it, too, on the production server. (Like AT, WordPress uses MySql, so it won't require another database program install.)