24-25 Final Reflection

This year at Vivero was not as fast paced as it felt last year. This is mainly because of being a returning fellow and having less frequent on-the-job training, which allowed me to put more focus onto the tool I was working on in a given month. I was also able to explore newer tools that were not part of the usual training schedule, like Elementor and CollectionBuilder. I think in my first year at Vivero I was worried that I was learning so many tools that I would not be able to recall the information to be able to help peers. However, now I realize that there are always opportunities to revisit past tools as a refresher, and I do take advantage of that with the more flexible training schedule I have as a returning fellow.

I made a lot of progress on the TDPS Archive this year compared to last year, in my opinion. To be fair, the project was still in its infancy when I joined, as we were just trying to gather information on archival resources and content hosting. Toward the end of that year, we found answers to those questions and we were able to get started on actually creating something tangible. Building the framework of the archive website with CollectionBuilder was definitely the highlight of my project work because I was working with a new tool and incorporating in directly into my project. I’ve discussed this a lot in other reflections, but I really enjoyed using CollectionBuilder and diving deeper into more of the source code to solve problems I had with the default template. The most challenging part of the project has been filling in the metadata sheet purely because of the volume of shows and show information that needs to be collected. This is a task that, sooner or later, will need more hands attached to it. At the moment I am writing documentation that involves filling in this spreadsheet, so at least the task will be more manageable for whoever it falls to when I do leave.

My last training involved using wget, a program for saving webpages as html locally. I have had a passing interest in preservation of digital projects ever since taking DST-295 last year, so it would be nice to explore the topic in the future.

Python Practice Reflection

For my final training, I decided to do some python exercises on LinkedIn Learning. I have coded in python before, but since coming to Grinnell I have not revisited it in favor of languages like Java and C. The exercises I did revolved around string manipulation, which I have done plenty of in computer science classes with other coding languages. I realized that since python is a dynamic language, a lot of operations on strings can be done as if they were any other data type (e.g. comparing if two strings are equal). Getting used to this change was a little weird, and I think overall I prefer other object oriented languages, but I think I will still pursue learning more about python in the future.