Final Thoughts

In the beginning of this course, I didn't know much about servers, I had never heard of MySQL, and I had heard of Linux but had never seen it. I also never new about project management. I think I have learned a lot from this course though. I understand better how technology works, how it has to be thought out well and planned for, and how important it is to know the language so you know what's going on. My perspective has changed on digital management. I knew that a lot of work went into it, but not exactly how much and how much you need to know and understand. It is a little intimidating. I sometimes wonder if I can make it through the certificate. It was a really difficult class for me, but I'm glad I took it. I'm feel like I have learned a lot, and things are now clicking for me. The whole LAMP thing finally completely clicked for me. That was cool. I actually enjoyed MySQL and would like to be able to use it better. And the PHP assignments help me to understand how it works with MySQL.

Week 12 Readings

The Cervone articles were great. “Project risk management” was simple to understand and went over how to address risks before they come up and what are the usual risk factors that occur in digital library projects. I thought that these were really interesting. It was really helpful to put things in to risk categories. It then went over what sorts of steps to take to assess and control risks. It was an easy article for beginners. If I were more advanced, I might want more detail in steps to take. “Standard methodology in digital library project management” was also helpful to me. It went over why a structured methodology is important in structuring the project environment. He specifically talked about PMBOK. After reading the long PMBOK material, and then reading this, it was helpful to read someone else going over and kind of summarizing the process. I think that these last two articles would be helpful even if you weren’t doing a digital library project. In "How not to run a digital library project," he begins talking about project management and librarians getting glazed eyes when it is mentioned. He says many librarians do not come from backgrounds that use project management, especially if they are from humanities and social sciences backgrounds. I was a literature major, and I never heard of project management so it was scary to me at first and seems overwhelming when reading about it. I like how he goes over the things to not do in a sarcastic way. It made it interesting. “ Making Decisions: Methods for Digital Library Project Teams” also useful. It showed how to break down decision making and how to make a decision. I like how in all of his articles, he takes something that can be pretty complicated and intimidating, and lays it out in a simple and helpful way.

SQL Versus Other Topics

Learning SQL was easier for me than most of the other topics. Of course, I am no good at it right now, but I'm sure I can get it with a lot of practice. It at least made sense to me, and I understood what was happening in the videos and in the assignment. Data modeling last week was harder for me, especially the joining together of two tables that had multiple relationships. This made a little more sense this week when working with SQL. I also has some difficulty with the join function. It made sense in the lecture, but then in the videos I became confused. I then looked at the W3Schools and it helped. SQL was a little harder for me than XML. I was scared of XML, but it really isn't bad. Since I know some HTML, it helped. The hardest topics were things dealing with the server and networking and learning all of the new terminology. I am a lot more comfortable now entering commands in the command line though. Although I will still have to look most of them up to make sure I'm doing it right.

Data Modeling and Normalization

The Wikipedia article on data modeling was a little hard to get through. I understood it better when I read the article Data Modeling: Finding the Perfect Fit and it talked about entities more clearly. Then it really helped when I read about the ERD. The UACBT-VTC MySQL videos were helpful too. I didn’t get everything about the ERD though. I understood the crow’s feet and the O. But when it started getting into lines and dashes, I got a little confused. The Entity Relationship Diagram Example was helpful, but I was still confused some. I just need to practice.

For normalization, the UACBT-VTC MySQL videos were pretty easy to understand. But when I got to the Wikipedia article, I had no clue what it was talking about. The University of Texas page on normalization was a little confusing, but I started to understand it better. Then the Database Normalization Pt 1 and Database Normalization Pt 2 were really helpful. Part 1 summarized the benefits right away and talked about the primary key right away, instead of waiting until later to say how important it was. It made it seem simple, but maybe that’s because I had already read several things by then. The Three Normal Forms tutorial was a little hard to look at. I had to scroll up and down to see the spreadsheet and then read about it. It is nice that it is provided as a pdf. I saved it and might print it in order to read it better. But I liked that it showed a real spreadsheet. That was helpful.

I think I need to reread some articles and I think that something like this really takes experience to understand completely. I understood somewhat because of working with Access and trying to create a database. It’s hard work and a lot of thinking and planning. Data modeling and normalization helped me to understand why it’s so hard and why it’s important to really plan the database out well before creating it.

Week 9 Readings

"Technoplans vs. Technolust" by Michael Stephens was a good article. It made a technology plan simple to understand. I liked how it talked about who should be involved - "administrators, IT personnel, reference librarians, and others, including those who interact with patrons and understand what they want." I was happy that he added those who interact with patrons and that he mentioned that communication is important for staff buy in. Staff seem to be overlooked a lot when decisions are made even though they really know the customers well.

Another good article was "What went wrong? Unsuccessful information technology projects" by Brenda Whittaker. It was helpful in understanding why technology plans failed. It really made a lot of sense and made it clear for me why some projects that happened in my work place failed.

"Life is what happens to you when you’re making other plans" by Michael Shuyler was in interesting article. He seemed to think that technology plans were not that helpful and were needed for others and not for those who write them. I liked how he mentioned that they should be flexible and gave an example with things that really happened to him.

"Information technology plans" by Robert Dugan was a really good article. It explained well the process for writing a technology plan. It talks about how it can be a guide for many different things such as identifying weaknesses and strengths concerning technology implementations, letting everyone know what the library is doing, to manage a budget, among many other things. It talked about how information technology plans can be structured three different ways in academic libraries. Where I work, it is part of the strategic plan. It also talked about how to write a plan and what sections are recommended to be included. I think that this article is really helpful.

Demo system update

My demo system is running fine. I completed all of the week 8 assignments successfully. I had a problem pinging my demo until I figured out that I didn't have the ethernet cord plugged in. It was really cool learning how to connect remotely and creating a webpage.

XML Tutorials

The 3M tutorial was fine. It was like the HTML one. Seems simple, but boring to look at and the screen is too busy. I went through the XML schema tutorial too. I had to read that one at least three times before I understood it somewhat. It makes sense why one would make a schema.

The UACBT videos were pretty good. The parts where he just did PowerPoint was pretty boring to watch. The parts where he showed how to right XML made a lot of sense. He explained things well and clearly. He really made the difference between and the uses for HTML and XML clear.