MediaShelf Blog

At the moment, I’m witnessing Richard Green from University of Hull masterfully dissecting the notion of an Institutional Repository.  Its a treat to have someone spell this stuff out step by step from such a grounded perspective.  One wonderful element of his presentation was to simply leave some time for people to explore ePrints and DSpace repositories [1][2][3] (from the perspective of public end users).  He made the point that people, myself included, often work with only one repository system (or no repository system) and neglect to simply explore the existing options.

In the midst of his presentation about the RepoMMan project, Richard posed an interesting pair of questions regarding the prospect of giving users a private “My Repository” space for managing their stuff.  He asked us:

1. What might a user want to get from “My Repository”?
2. What might a user want to put into “My Repository”?

He allowed the room to ponder these questions for a while.  I must admit that I was left doubting my knee-jerk responses and in turn thinking a bit further about what users really want from systems like this.  Richard then reported that a survey of his users at University of Hull provided a resounding response.  His users wanted:  Storage (safe, backed up), Access (easy and from anywhere), Management (full version control), and Preservation (to know stuff is there when they want it, short and long term).  I found this to be much more straight forward than the responses I expected.

Richard then gave us a tour of the RepoMMan interface.  Some key characteristics of the systems are the fact that the web interface, which is implemented in Flex, mimics an FTP client (to provide familiarity) and the metadata editor uses Data Fountains to pre-populate objects with automatically generated metadata so that users can then review and revise existing metadata rather than starting from a blank form.

The presentation will continue this afternoon.  By the end of the week, Richard’s full slide deck for the presentation will be up in the RIRI repository.

The Red Island Repository Institute (RIRI), hosted by the University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI) has started with a bang.  Sandy Payette spent an entire day feeding the room with a wonderful mix of vision, software architecture, social context, and technical details.

Mark Leggott has put together a great event. There are people here from all over North America, and even one visitor from Australia.  Everyone has been enjoying the beautiful environs of Prince Edward Island and the quality of information being exchanged is top notch.  I particularly like the fact that Mark is “drinking his own kool-aid” by setting up a Drupal/Fedora site for the institute.

This should be a great week.

Five years ago developers spent a lot of time speaking SQL when they talked about writing a database-driven app. Since then, we have enjoyed the arrival of modern webapp frameworks with good ORM. Now developers spend very little time talking about SQL. Instead, they talk about higher level problems and application-specific challenges. In other words, we are able to spend developer resources in more potent ways. This has played a major role in the recent upsurge of innovative, user-driven apps.

Right now I’m sitting in Christopher Brown’s JA-SIG presentation about writing a Fedora App in ColdFusion. Christopher has done valiant work. He’s a trailblazer. More importantly, he has a functioning application that is now in active use. However, I can’t help but feel like we’ve backpedaled five years in terms of developer experience. Christopher’s slides are dominated by Fedora-specific structures and the terminology from Fedora’s APIs. I feel like I’m back in SQL land. Being forced to think about this boilerplate code is an unnecessary burden for developers. It prevents them from fully taking advantage of Fedora’s power.

Now that we’ve had RubyFedora in hand for a few weeks and have been playing with ActiveFedora for a while, it’s really encouraging to be reminded what the alternative is. I’m so eager to set free developers like Christopher, to let them forget about the boilerplate code, so that instead they can invent new ways of helping users do crazy stuff with their digital content.