Courtesy of Seth Shaw and Ben Goldman, who pointed this out to me, I’d like to take note of an email program that has very specialized, but potentially important, use: the YPOPs program. This is a Windows application which can be used to establish an IMAP or POP3 Connection to Yahoo email account, from which you would be able to download email for preservation purposes.
The project seems to be dormant, but there is a project website at http://ypopsemail.com/ and a sourceforge site at http://sourceforge.net/projects/yahoopops/.
The University of Illinois Archives is current searching for a full-time Archival Operations and Reference Specialist. The position will report directly to me and will have responsibilities for overseeing the American Library Association Archives and for providing reference services for University Archives. Although this is initially a two-year appointment, there is a possibility that it could be extended or made into a continuing appointment, depending on funding. It offers the ability to work with a wide range of archival functions, from pre-custodial work through access.
A copy of the position description is available at https://jobs.illinois.edu/default.cfm?page=job&jobID=18473.
If you are interested in learning more about this job, please contact me via email.
As I noted in previous posts, I am configuring WordPress network for the new University of Illinois Archives site. In order to make the generic WordPress install to a fully functional CMS, I will be be selecting a theme framework, customizing the theme, and adding plugins to extend the core WordPress functionality. Before I start with that, however, I’d like to explain a bit about how WordPress works under the hood. Over the past year or so I’ve gradually come to see that this knowledge makes one a better WordPress administrator.
Like Drupal and several other CMS systems, WordPress includes a core set of files that dynamically produce the site. In version 3.13. the core is about nine megabytes in size.
There are many reasons why wordpress is so popular, but underlying all of these reasons is the way that the WordPress ‘hooks’ system operates. In this post, I’ll explain what the hooks system is, why you should care about it, and how that knowledge can help you select themes and plugins.
I’m attending a lecture by Jeff Ubios, who is speaking at the University of Illinois this afternoon, as part of our Research Data Initiative. Here are some notes from the talk.
Beth Sandore: Jeff has been engaged in many activities important to cultural heritage institutions and the media industry, related to managing. Hist 2006 article about Google Books (D-Lib) is well known. In 2007, he became interested in the topic of personal digital archiving, and had been a consultant for libraries, museums. The remarks he gives today are based on his personal work, not his current role as grants officer at MacArthur.
He wants us to see this as a very interesting area of research. It is worthy of more attention and investment. His talk reflects on what is being done now and what might be done to move forward.
It is tempting to see this as an unsolvable problem. But he sees it as, perhaps, the basis for future sustainability of cultural heritage institutions; they will lead to enormous cultural value.
If you are going to be using wordpress as a CMS for an organization with many subgroups, you may wish to enable WordPress Multisite.
Multisite allows you to run many WordPress sites as a network within a single installation. In the case of the University of Illinois Archives, several of our program areas, such as the Student Life and Culture and Sousa Archives, would like to have blogs and other features. These will be separate from the main site. They will have a separate set of users, a different look and feel, and some diffierent features. By using mulitsite, we can provide them a separate identify while also allowing content to feed into and nest within into the main site.
So, to set the basis for long term growth, our first step after installing WordPress is to enable it for multisite usage. It is best to enable it right away, even if you won’t be using all of its features, if you plan to use it in the future.* Before beginning, it is a good idea to read the wordpress.org pages Before you Create a Network.
First, we enable multisite mode by editing the file wp-config.php to insert the following code:
define('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true);
Enabling WordPress Network
Once this has been completed, the option “Network Settings,” appears in the Dashboard, under the Tools menu. When enabling the network, you make a one-time decision as to whether the sub-sites should be created as sub-domains or sub-folders.
Enabling the Network
In order to use the sub-domain option, your webserver must allow for the creation of new sub-domains on the fly. You will likely need to see a system administrator to ensure that this is the case. It is much easier to configure the network to use sub-folders. It suits our needs better, so I choose that option.
After clicking through, you will need to edit two files on the server: wp-config.php and .htaccess. WordPress tells you the exact changes that need to be made, and you should cut and past the provided code into the two files, the save them. You can do this from the command line using vim or by using FTP and a text editor. (.htaccess is a hidden file that is used by an apache webserver to record rules as to server operations in the directory where it is found; common uses are to include URL rewrite rules.)
After you have save the changes, you will need to login to wordpress, before you can use the multisite features. If the login is not being accepted, you should clear your browser cache and cookies and/or generate a new set of secret keys to replace the existing ones in the wp-config.php file.
*While it is not impossible to enable multisite later in time you will find it harder to do. You may not be able to create the sub-sites using the folder mapping method described above.
In my last post, I mentioned that WordPress has been essential to my growth in understanding digital technologies and digital preservation. That is true not because I am a WordPress end user, but because I have administered WordPress.
Back in 2009, when I began this blog, I faced a fundamental choice: would I used a hosted blog service, such as one provided through WordPress.com or Blogger, or would I install and manage the blog myself? I chose the latter option because a) I didn’t like the terms of service for the hosted accounts; b) I didn’t think hosted accounts provided enough flexibility; c) I really wanted to learn something about how blogs worked ‘under the hood’; and d) WordPress had the same basic server requirements as Archon, an application I had previously installed and managed.
I’m really glad I chose to host it myself, because installing the software forced me to engage with server administration tasks, theme customization, and user design issues in a systematic way. I also discovered that the process of installing and managing a web application is not as daunting as it might seem. In fact, I think it is well within the skill set of most archivists or general computer users.
To illustrate that, I’ll be using my next several posts to walk through basic installation and configuration of WordPress, which is being used as the base technology behind the new University of Illinois Archives website.
At the CARLI forum today, I gave a talk titled (somewhat tongue in cheek), “Lessons from a (former?) digital preservation neophyte.” The Powerpoint slides can be found here in pdf format.
I used the talk to reflect on my personal growth as an archivist, via my engagement with digital preservation literature and tools (as well as the Scottish highlands), arguing that we should all approach electronic records issues as a “newly planted” (original etymology) neophyte. The key for me is in the act of ‘doing’ or practicing digital preservation, not reading about it from the sacred texts (whatever those may be). It gave me a chance to use one of my favorite quotes from Erich Fromm: “Thought can lead us only to the knowledge but it cannot give us the ultimate answer. . . The only way in which the world can ultimately be grasped lies not in thought, but in the act.” (The Art of Loving, 78-79.)
Toward the end, I made the case for several tools that I see as critical to my future growth as a practitioner:
- WordPress
- ArchivesSpace (as replacement for Archivists Toolkit and Archon)
- Archivematica
- Thinkup
- Muse
- Parallel-Flickr
I love all of these projects because 1) they either make use or are in the process of becoming de facto standards; 2) they use collaborative development models, with strong governance and agile development processes; and 3) they can be widely and easily adopted since they have a ‘low implementation bar’. I hope to use all of these as I push forward with my iKive idea, for which I now has seed funding.
Jim Bradley, Head, Metadata and Digital Initiative at Ball State, provided an Introduction to Technologies and Processes for the Care of Digital Collections, specifically the digital media repository at Ball State University. Basically, this is a ContentDM installation. First upload on Feb 2005. 373,578 items in 124 collections. 400 archival collections are represented. Average growth rate of 25.6 items for hour over the seven year life of project. So obviously they have a record of sucesses. today he will talk about
Today I’m attending and speaking at a forum sponsored by the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois, Digital Preservation: An Introduction to Technologies and Processes for the Care of Digital Collections. It is being held here in Campaign.
First speaker is Lynne Thomas. Lynne is the Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University Libraries she’ll be talking about “Digital Preservation 101.”
DP is not:
- Scary;
- Impossible,
- Difficult to Understand;
- Someone Else’s Problem;
- Anything we can’t handle . . . eventually;
- Something we must do by ourselves.
Even though the topic of this blog is practical approach to e-records, I’d like to take the next few weeks to reflect on web design and architecture issues, since the way I really began to learn something about how web technologies work was by implementing them. And, since I am in the process of moving the University of Illinois website to a new server and a new architecture, I thought I might share a thoughts as to how anyone can get started working with server technologies to improve archival access. All of these posts will be tagged ‘websites’ so they can be accessed here: http://e-records.chrisprom.com/?tag=websites
Today, I’d like to just lay out what I’ll be doing and why, and I’ll try to follow up with additional posts as we go along.
What?
Basically, I’ll be setting up a new website for the University of Illinois Archives. My library technology group has given me a virtual machine, running Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 6.2. Apache and PHP were configured, and over the past several weeks we installed some php extensions needed for Archon and for some common web applications such as wordpress, omeka and drupal. I can access the computer in three ways:
- via an ssh terminal (I use PuTTy from Window and terminal from my macbook; I have sudo (i.e. ‘administrator’) access to the entire machine)
- via the file system (for techies, this is via a samba connection; only provides access to the webfolder)
- via secure ftp. (In practical terms, I don’t use it since I have file system access)
Why?
The existing University of Illinois Archives website is probably the antithesis of user centered design (UCD), and it is also hard for existing staff to manage. It grew over many years, and many graduate students and employees have developed pages and sub-pages, without a consistent design philosophy. It is far overdue for an overhaul, as I found out recently, when teaching my SAA workshop “Analyzing and Improving Archival Websites.”
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