Knowledge organization, storage, and retrieval are at the core of library and information science. The earliest lists of books in libraries are not-so-distant relatives of our modern relational databases and XML schemas. As a new practitioner, understanding the technologies which can support and enhance a user's experience while maintaining the integrity and authority of the records and their relationships is a necessity.
Because I had some experience in the computer science and technology fields before entering the MLIS program, I looked for opportunities to grow in areas I was unfamiliar with. Each of the technology projects I pursued is embedded in web-based technologies. This is not only because I had no experience building even simple sites before coming to the iSchool, but also because the web has developed and continues to develop as a powerful tool. I knew when I began that many jobs that I would be interested in would require some ability and fluency in this area, so I focused on projects that would address four key areas:
These four areas reflect not only my interest in a user-centered perspective, but also my desire to push myself outside of my personal, technological, and academic "comfort zones".
This class is designed to integrate technology techniques into an individual humanities research project. I chose to approach a body of my poetry as deconstructable and reconfigurable, treating each line in each poem not unlike a function or a module in a program.
This project required investigations into TEI, the Text Encoding Initiative; coding in PHP and JavaScript; Flash animation and animated gifs; applying Dublin Core (DC) metadata; hand-coding HTML for accessibility and cross-browser standards; and installing and using Cygwin, a command-line environment for Windows. While this site isn't the most graphically sophisticated page, each page has DC metadata applied, and the site can be viewed in its entirety in almost every browser, including the text-based Lynx browser.
My introduction to HTML and other markup languages may not have been
the typical entry point to those skills, but it prepared me to excel
in not only building my own sites, but also in the real-world job
environment as a Graduate Assistant whose duties include building
course websites.
Poetry Project
For an independent study project, I worked with Terry Brooks to understand XUL, the XML-based User Interface Language. XUL leverages Firefox to provide additional functionality to webpages, including powerful user-based customization. To demonstrate my understanding of XUL, I built two XUL-based tutorials, a "tech-savvy" version as well as a simpler version.
This project combined two of my lifelong goals: seeking out and
understanding new technologies, and delivering instruction. Getting a chance
to play with XUL and be really pushed by Terry to understand it on a deep level
was fun, but putting that gained knowledge into an immediately useful context
was truly satisfying.
XUL Tutorial
With a group of 6 other students (2 MSIM and 4 MLIS) in Bob Boiko's class, I worked through a process of looking at a client's website, reverse-engineering the content, developing an XML schema, creating a valid, well-formed XML instance, and transforming that instance into HTML to be styled by CSS. Working as a member of a team and working with an existing site proved the value of practical experience as I am already using those skills to qualify for positions I could not apply for otherwise.
While our team did not have access to clients per se, we did identify an informal persona in the form of a historian who would want to take advantage of the incredible amount of information accessible through the existing ICTR site. These "clients" would need to have the content of the site reorganized and reprioritized for their own patterns of search and retrieval. They would also need summary or thumbnail information about any given resource, so that they could efficiently navigate to and retrieve relevant resources.
At first, using a historical perspective helped to shield me from the content I was working with, but eventually the reality of the reports our team was coding into XML surfaced. Being exposed to sometimes horrifying and difficult content was a challenge I had never imagined I would face, let alone thought I would face in my academic program. Understanding that the ICTR site could be made better in terms of providing access to people seeking to understand the historical context of these events was a much more compelling experience than a business case could ever be. It helped me internalize what I was learning in a way that was unexpectedly powerful.
One note for those interested in seeing the team's finished product:
The site itself is rendered dynamically using
ASP.NET, Microsoft's set of web-application development technologies.
Because the content is generated dynamically each time a page loads,
our team site must be selected from a choice of alternative
sites from the drop-down box on the default page. The team site is the
default choice in the drop-down box on the linked page below.
AnySite Viewer