Because my TDPS project work picked up a lot this month, my professional development reflection will focus on the things I’ve done for the project and what skills I have built on.
Mark McFate has developed a few projects that were crucial to getting the project running smoothly: a new CollectionBuilder template, and a tool to make creating objects and linking them to the metadata spreadsheet a simple workflow for batches of objects. We reformatted the metadata sheet for the new CB template and transferred the changes on my test CB site to that one. The template Mark had also included a live deployment, which led to us having a public website I could share with Kate and Erik instead of just my local test build. The object linking used an app called Manage Digital Ingest. I cloned Mark’s repo to use the app for the TDPS project, and it has been very helpful in populating the website. Because MDI is still being developed, Mark and I have been using the TDPS project as an opportunity to test it’s capabilities and make any quality-of-life improvements. This has involved plenty of communication between us to share and issues or ideas that come up.
As the project has gotten more defined in its workflows for managing and maintaining the CB website, I have added more to the documentation I created last year when I first started working with the CB site. I have been updating it to include everything needed for the website maintenance, including GitHub, MDI, ideal metadata formatting, etc. I also realized that, as I was sharing this document with Kate and Erik, I needed to make things easy for them to understand and replicate. Although they did not need to make changes to much of the website outside of the metadata sheet, they would still eventually have access to MDI and the rest of the project files, so it would be good for them to have that information at hand, too. I am working on being as thorough as possible in my document, and I even included a section just for defining technical terms that I end up using a lot. I did make sure to walk through the workflow of updating the metadata sheet in person with them, so they could do it with my guidance, and I will plan to do the same with MDI once that is available to them.