The Grinnell College Digital Library Application Developer's Blog

Call it The GCDLADB if you like.

2 min read Oct 5, 2022
Lately I’ve lamented that all incoming emails to @grinnell.edu addresses pass through a URLDefense / Proofpoint agent that sanitizes all clickable links as a safety/security precaution. In the case of emails automatically dispatched by GitHub the “butchering” of such messages leaves me with an almost useles notification, one that’s so badly bloated that I typically choose to ignore it. Clearly, that’s not how notifications are suppsoed to be handled. Example of a Butchered Email To help make my point I’ll share a small portion of a relatively small email notification below. ...

Creating a WARC from a Wordpress Clone

11 min read Sep 6, 2022
This blog post chronicles portions of a process used to restore and subsequently WARC (the creation of a web archive) a Communication Department website that had been retired. The website content of interest included material describing plans for the recently-completed HSSC and Administration Building projects. During the restoration and WARC process a .md document named WARC-from-comm.sites.grinnell.edu-clone.md was created and it’s contents are presented here. Creating a WARC from a Clone of comm.sites.grinnell.edu In July 2022 a new “clone” of the original comm. ...

Rebuilding ISLE for Digital.Grinnell

2 min read Jun 23, 2022 | Updated: Jan 20, 2023 22:26 Superseded by posts/137-updating-digital.grinnell-one-more-time.md
This blog post will be used to chronicle a process I’m using to rebuild Digital.Grinnell in Legacy Islandora using ISLE. This process was triggered by ITS’ intent to move DG’s FEDORA repository to a new server. That new server is currently mounted on node DGDockerX, my staging server, as /mnt/datastage and it contains a copy of DG’s production FEDORA repository made on or about June 15, 2020. PORTABLE-DG For starters I’m going be doing lots of “local” ISLE work up-front so I’m creating a USB drive backup/copy of /mnt/datastage. ...

Using the Library Virtual Desktop

2 min read Jun 16, 2022
A couple of months ago the Screen Sharing connection to the iMac in my campus office stopped working, presumably because ITS no longer allowed that connection. No matter, rather than working to get that restored I thought I’d dry using a Virtual Desktop connection to a Windows VM. I also had some need to work with Windows in other capacities so this seemed like a nice dual-purpose solution. It worked! Now I’m trying to remember and document how it works. ...

Migrating Workflows from Atom to VSCode

3 min read Jun 9, 2022
This might just be my shortest post ever in this blog, at least for now. At this early date it’s just a link to the Atom No More? blog post in my personal blog. The note above indicates that this post superseeds 085-remote-atom, but there are other Atom-related posts that are also impacted. Some of these include: posts/033-adding-lastmod-date/ As time passes I’ll document here any work-specific changes I make to my new VSCode environments. Replacing atom . with code . The personal blog post mentioned above, Atom No More? ...

Moving Bags to Cloud Storage

1 min read May 3, 2022
For now this is just a place-holder document that I hope to populate soon. And that’s a wrap. Until next time, be safe! 😄 ...

New Oral History Transcription Workflow

15 min read Mar 24, 2022
Digital.Grinnell features a fair number of transcribed digital oral histories. Most are interviews conducted with Grinnelleans as they return to campus annually for alumni Reunion or Grinnell’s Multicultural Reunion. What follows is largely sharable “public” content lifted from a “private” GitHub repository at https://github.com/McFateM/OHScribe, the README.md and WORKFLOW.md files in particular. OHScribe! https://ohscribe.us.reclaim.cloud/ Note: This link is the new production home for OHScribe! as of March 2022. It is now hosted on Reclaim Cloud. The old address, https://ohscribe.grinnell.edu, is no longer in service. ...

Problems with dc:identifier Elements

3 min read Feb 18, 2022
The addition of scholar profiles from LASIR, specifically the module’s introduction of /mods/identifier[@type='u1'] and /mods/identifier[@type='u2'] fields, has caused a few problems in Digital.Grinnell. Perhaps the most sinister of these… these fields are transformed into DC or Dublin Core elements that wreak havoc with our OAI export and subsequent import into Primo VE. OAI Exports While on the subject of OAI, it’s worth noting here that we can query to see the OAI that Digital.Grinnell exported by visiting a URL like: https://digital. ...

IHC is Back!

5 min read Feb 17, 2022
Note to self: IHC is back in DG production! What’s IHC, you ask? IHC is my Islandora Health Check drush command/module. Since this is a note to myself, I’m not going to get into a lot of detail here, just posting some reminders so I can remember how it works and how it is used. What Is It? IHC is a module that provides drush commands that can be used to collect (drush ihcC), analyze (drush ihcA), and subsequently report (drush ihcR) key object info from DG’s FEDORA repository. ...

IDU DiffDatastreamVersions Command

8 min read Feb 14, 2022
Recently, I have been catching up on processing some pending metadata review edits in DG’s Faculty Scholarship and Student Scholarship collections. Since these two collections are relatively “fluid”, they get frequent additions and metadata changes, I was worried that introducing bulk edits could negatively impact some objects. So I set out to find, or create, a tool that would help me evaluate the impact of these edits. Islandora Pretty Text Diff I was fortunate to find a very nice tool all ready-to-go, the Islandora Pretty Text Diff module, specifically islandora_pretty_text_diff. ...