Lo, it is designed
Rolled out the new design yesterday. Went quite smoothly, all things considered—which of course meant I found three more bugs today, two of which were my stupid fault. Squashed ’em all; haven’t found any others. Yet.
And I entered six new items into the repository today, which makes me happy. For lo, I am useful. (Not to mention that lo! whatever I borked on the staging server that broke the batch importer never got borked on the main server, so I had no trouble at all. Y’all have no idea how happy I am about that.)
I’m also finding all kinds of new things to loathe about the DSpace interface. “Policies for Item 1920/235 (ID=243),” proclaims a set-permissions page. Well, excuse me for breathing, but I can’t remember all the handle numbers, never mind the database keys! Would it kill to title the page something recognizable?
Tomorrow I head out to one of the satellite campuses to introduce the project and myself and (I hope) generate some interest. Several of the departments out there sit squarely in my sights as likely to generate some early adopters. I’m considering starting a community specifically for early adopters, in fact, the first people in their departments to submit stuff to the repository. A little extra notoriety for them, easier recruitment for me (since I can go after individuals instead of having to convince an entire department to sign on), a good thing all around.
And of course I’m going to call them “MARS Pathfinders,” because really, how can I not?
Yes, I’ve got Mars images festooned all over my presentations, not least because NASA has given so many stunning images to the public domain. I didn’t extend the theme to the actual repository design, because making the repository feel like an integral part of the university was far more important than indulging my juvenile taste for puns, but presentations are fair game.
In other news, I hit my first Java class last night; fortunately, it didn’t hit back very hard. I’ll learn some things about GUI programming that should serve me well.