Re: [CODE4LIB] Google can give you answers, but librarians give you the right answers

[Karen Coyle]

On 4/6/16 9:51 AM, Kyle Banerjee wrote:

On Wed, Apr 6, 2016 at 7:42 AM, Karen Coyle  wrote:


... Libraries "do" it, but our user interfaces ignore it (honestly, does
anyone NOT think that the whole BT/NT relationship in LCSH is completely
wasted in today's systems?).  Google searches "work" best on proper nouns
that are nearly unique. You cannot do concept searches, and you cannot see
relationships between concepts. It's great for named people, organizations
and products, but not great for anything else.[1]...


Conceptually, I like the idea of using the relationships in LCSH. However,
I don't hold out much hope that anyone will make hay out of that.

The percentage of things that have decent LCSH assigned to them is small
and shrinking for the simple reason that a fewer and fewer humans have to
manage more resources.


I'm not sure what you are saying here -- that there are fewer headings 
being assigned, or that they are not as "good" as ones assigned in the 
past? Or is it that many of our resources aren't covered by library 
cataloging rules?



Automation could help (getting the needed data from
publishers might be tricky), but the only benefit I can think of for using
LCSH for automated applications is to maximize relationships with older
materials -- possibly at the expense of the "findability" of the newer
stuff.

LCSH is relatively flat, the rules for constructing headings are so
Byzantine that they stymie even experienced catalogers (which contributes
to inconsistent application in terms of quality, level of analysis, and
completeness), and its ability to express concepts at all is highly
variable as it is designed by a committee on an enumerative basis.


?? Sorry, what's this "enumerative basis"?


  Add to
this that concepts in records frequently must be expressed across multiple
headings and subheadings, any type of automated assignment is going to
result in really "dirty" relationships so I can't blame ILS designers for
limiting their use of LCSH primarily to controlled keyword access.


Well, actually, there's nothing at all "controlled" about keyword 
access. It's pretty much a pot shot, or, as I've called it before, a 
form of dumpster diving for information. There is a huge disconnect 
between the results of keyword searching and the expected functionality 
(read: user service) of controlled left-anchored headings, and I 
continue to be amazed that we've been living with this disconnect for 
decades without ever coming to an agreement that we need a solution.[1] 
Instead, great effort goes into modifying the descriptive cataloging 
rules, while no major changes have been made in subject access. I find 
this to be... well, stunning, in the sense that I'm pretty much stunned 
that this is the case.


kc

[1] See Lorcan Dempsey's approach in this slide deck: 
http://www.slideshare.net/lisld/irish-studies-making-library-data-work-harder 
. It has to do with "things", which is in good part what I first found 
interesting about LoD.


kyle


--
Karen Coyle
kco...@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
m: +1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet/+1-510-984-3600

Re: [CODE4LIB] Islandora & Vagrant - Development use only?

[Annamarie C Klose]

Thank you, Alan, for the further explanation. These are, definitely, important 
distinctions.

I appreciate your support, Code4Lib community!

-Original Message-
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Harnum, 
Alan
Sent: Friday, April 08, 2016 9:11 AM
To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Islandora & Vagrant - Development use only?

While I can’t comment on the Islandora piece, I’ll make the following comments 
about Vagrant in the context of how we use it as part of our development and 
ops process:

- Vagrant is used as described below for “disposable environments and 
consistent workflow” for testing our automation scripts and tools - we use 
fairly barebones Vagrantfiles to bring up VMs that match our production 
environment targets, then provision those with the same Ansible playbook 
intended to be used in production. This lets us rapidly develop and test our 
automation before turning it loose on an environment outside our local machines

- production servers are also virtual machines, using KVM on Red Hat; these get 
provisioned with the same Ansible playbooks developed initially using Vagrant. 
There’s nothing inherently unsound about the idea of running using virtual 
machines in production, provided you understand the reasons behind and accept 
the overhead of doing so (in our case, our production VMs are launched and 
managed on a large, dedicated cluster intended for virtualization)

- it’s possible the idea is to use Vagrant as a virtual machine management 
solution in production; I agree with others below that this isn’t an optimal 
solution, nor I think would Vagrant’s creators (I personally Hashicorp has 
blurred the lines on this in recent years as they try to extend their business 
model, which may be where some of this is coming from)

- if the position is that Vagrant is the same class of environment isolation 
tool as RVM or virtualenv, that’s a misunderstanding; RVM or virtualenv create 
isolated environments with very little overhead running on the same system, 
while Vagrant creates virtual machines with all the overhead that entails

ALAN HARNUM
SENIOR INCLUSIVE DEVELOPER
INCLUSIVE DESIGN RESEARCH CENTRE, OCAD UNIVERSITY

E ahar...@ocadu.ca

On Apr 7, 2016, at 1:56 PM, Annamarie C Klose 
mailto:ackl...@frostburg.edu>> wrote:

Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on this issue. I've posted my 
question to the Islandora Google group, as well. I'll be meeting with my 
university's IT department on Monday. I appreciate your help!

Anna

-Original Message-
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Cindi 
Blyberg
Sent: Wednesday, April 06, 2016 5:46 PM
To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Islandora & Vagrant - Development use only?

Cary, the snippet to your email as shown in my inbox only showed the first 
sentence. Glad to read the rest! :)

On Wed, Apr 6, 2016 at 2:01 PM, Cary Gordon 
mailto:listu...@chillco.com>> wrote:

I disagree with the statement that "Vagrant is not a good idea for production.” 
Vagrant is a terrible idea for production, and it is not designed for that.

We use Ansible to build Islandora, and, after three years of talking about it 
we are starting to use it with Docker. We are an AWS shop, so we use Docker 
with AWS elastic container service, which could come in handy if one of your 
archives gets slashdotted.

Cary

On Apr 6, 2016, at 8:53 AM, Chris Fitzpatrick 
mailto:chrisfitz...@gmail.com>>
wrote:

Vagrant is not a good idea for production. It's really for people to work 
against a copy of the production environment.
Like you can use Vagrant, then update a ansible or puppet or chef script then 
deploy that to yr VM.
Hashicorp is making something called Otto which is supposed to replace Vagrant 
for end-to-end deployments like this, but that's in alpha now.

Vagrant isn't  like virtualenv at all. Virtualenv is a way to maintain Python 
dependencies by mucking around with some environment variables.
It's
more like Ruby's bundler.

It's kinda more like Docker. Docker makes linux containers. Nobody knows what 
those are, but they work great.

I've seen Vagrant used in production and it supposedly worked well but the guy 
who set it up left and things went bad. It wasn't a performance issue, it's 
just really hard for the replacement to figure out what's going on.
Use Vagrant with Ansible/Puppet/Chef. Or use Docker. Or use all of that, for 
the win.



On Wed, Apr 6, 2016 at 3:55 PM, Francis Kayiwa 
mailto:kay...@pobox.com>> wrote:

On 4/6/16 9:49 AM, Annamarie C Klose wrote:

Hi, all,

Can anyone provide a technical explanation as to why it is not appropriate to 
install Islandora on a public server with Vagrant?
Despite
all the documentation instructing that Vagrant is for development only, my 
university's IT department thinks Vagrant makes Islandora more secure for 
production use. Th

Re: [CODE4LIB] Software used in Panama Papers Analysis [named entities]

[Eric Lease Morgan]

On Apr 8, 2016, at 5:13 PM, Jenn C  wrote:

> I worked on a text mining project last semester where I had a bunch of
> magazines with text that was totally unstructured (from IA). I would have
> really liked to know how to work entity matching into such a project. Are
> there text mining projects out there that demonstrate doing this?

If I understand your question correctly, then the Stanford Name Entity 
Recognition (NER) library/application may be one solution. [1]

Given text as input, a named entity recognition library/application returns a 
list of nouns (names, places, and things). The things can be all sorts of stuff 
such as organizations, dates, times, fiscal amounts, etc. Stanford’s NER is 
really a Java library, but has a command-line interface. Feed it a text, and 
you get back an XML stream. The stream contains elements, and each element is 
expected to be some sort of entity. Be forewarned. For the the best and most 
optimal performance, it is necessary to “train” the library/application. 
Frankly, I’ve never done that, and consequently, I guess I’ve never been 
optimal.* You also might want to take a read of the text from the Python 
Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) module. [2] The noted chapter gives a pretty 
good overview of the subject. 

[1] NER - http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/CRF-NER.shtml
[2] NLTK chapter - http://www.nltk.org/book/ch07.html

* ‘Story of my life.

—
Eric Lease Morgan

[CODE4LIB] 2016 NASIG Award Winners Announcement

[public...@nasig.org]

[CODE4LIB] Code4Lib New York State 2016: Save the Date, Participate

[Christina Harlow]

Hi all-

A Code4lib New York State Meeting will be 
held August 4-5 at Mann Library, Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. This meeting 
aims to be a great place to learn new skills, share ideas, and network with 
other library technologists from the region. The meeting is structured loosely 
around the “unconference” model, which encourages attendees to hold and run the 
activities, but with some workshops and talks planned in advance.

This message is a reminder/announcement to save the date and start thinking 
about how you would like to participate. We want this meeting to be a mix of 
prepared and impromptu sessions; as such, we’re making it possible now for 
folks to propose sessions and express interest in proposals in an informal 
manner. We have confirmed some morning workshops, and some great breakout 
sessions have been proposed - you can read more about the sessions so far and 
how to take part yourself here: http://code4libnys.github.io/2016/#sched

We are very excited to say that we will end out each day with invited talks 
from two fantastic and engaging members of our community: Patricia 
Hswe and Tara Robertson  
Their talks will help wrap up each day’s activities, as well as give needed 
context and grounding to our broader library technology work.

Registration will be free and opened up in late May/Early June. If you’ve got 
any questions, you can email me.

The event website: http://code4libnys.github.io/2016/

Thanks!

Christina

[CODE4LIB] Job: Library Web Analyst at Portland Community College

[jobs]

Library Web Analyst
Portland Community College
Portland

PCC Library is hiring a Library Web Analyst. The Library
Web Analyst is responsible for the coordination of systems and technology
applications for the library. This position supports the
library's network infrastructure, staff and public computer equipment and
software, integrated library system and discovery environments, and web
environment. Additionally, this position is responsible for exploring new
technologies and platforms to strategically support a variety of user-centered
service platforms and applications.

  

**Provides lead technical support and management of the library's website.** 
Builds, tests, and manages production and development environments. Maintains 
customization of the library website's content management system, WordPress. 
Designs and develops web applications in both development and production 
environments.  
  
**Supports integrated library system.** As a member of the Orbis Cascade 
Alliance, PCC currently uses Ex Libris's Alma/Primo in a consortial 
installation. This position is involved in coordinating systems integration 
with other PCC departments and other aspects of discovery, customization, and 
systems administration in Alma/Primo.  
  
**Manages the library's existing systems and servers.** Position works 
collaboratively with the College's Information Technology department.

  
Minimum qualifications: Bachelor's Degree in Information
Technology/Information Science/Informatics, Library Science, or Computer
Science. Relevant experience may substitute for the degree requirement on a
year-for-year basis. Two years experience working with vended library systems
and web development experience.

  
For more information, and to apply, please visit [http://jobs.pcc.edu/applican
ts/Central?quickFind=55259](http://jobs.pcc.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=5
5259)



Brought to you by code4lib jobs: http://jobs.code4lib.org/job/25238/
To post a new job please visit http://jobs.code4lib.org/

Re: [CODE4LIB] Software used in Panama Papers Analysis

[Kyle Banerjee]

On Fri, Apr 8, 2016 at 8:13 AM, Jenn C  wrote:

> I worked on a text mining project last semester where I had a bunch of
> magazines with text that was totally unstructured (from IA). I would have
> really liked to know how to work entity matching into such a project. Are
> there text mining projects out there that demonstrate doing this?
>

What did you use for entity identification? My gut reaction would be to
look at what the entity extractor pulled out and then normalize the source
in the hopes of improving the accuracy. Even when controlled vocab is not
used, normalizing data makes a massive difference.

 I am curious as to what the data for the Panama Papers looked like going
in. I would think significant normalization and structuring would be
necessary to leverage the advantages of using Blacklight over other tools.

kyle

Re: [CODE4LIB] Morae setup advice for screen recording

[Dubnicek, Ryan C]

Hi Jennifer,

I¹m currently using Morae for some usability testing, and have been happy
with it, mostly, though I imagine the options others have suggested are
great too. If you do go with Morae, one thing to note about Manager is
that (I believe) it¹s the only way to convert the output video files from
Morae¹s proprietary format, RDG, into more universal file formats, such as
.wmv/.mp4, so that you can play/edit outside of Morae. So not having
access to Manager after using Recorder could be a dependency for parallel
use.

Best,

‹Ryan

Ryan Dubnicek
Visiting Research Services Specialist
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
313 LIS Building, MC-493
501 E. Daniel Street | Champaign, IL 61820
rdubn...@illinois.edu
217-244-7260




On 4/7/16, 7:32 PM, "Code for Libraries on behalf of Jennifer DeJonghe"

wrote:

>I'm at a small public university and we do regular pop up usability
>testing, but want to purchase Morae and start doing some screen
>capturing. Since the license is rather expensive, I'm trying to do as
>much "sharing" among staff as I can within the bounds of what TechSmith
>allows and what is practical. I talked to TEchSmith person today, and
>they allow you to have multiple people using it on a shared computer.
>Your license gets you one copy of the Morae Manager, and unlimited copies
>of Recorder and Observer.
>
>My question for those of you who have Morae... Do you think it would be
>practical or advisable to install the single copy of Manager on a laptop,
>so that the laptop could be shared between multiple departments in
>various buildings? You don't use Manager during the actual testing, it is
>more for set up and analysis, so they said most people install that on
>their "good" computer. But installing it on a laptop might mean we could
>get more use from it. Is there anything I should think about before
>proceeding with this? We don't have a usability lab, so would probably
>purchase a dedicated shared laptop(s) for this. (I know I could use
>cheaper software, but I just got back from ER&L and was impressed with
>what I saw people doing with the TechSmith product.)
>
>Jennifer  
>
>Jennifer DeJonghe
>Librarian and Professor
>Metropolitan State University
>St. Paul, MN

Re: [CODE4LIB] Morae setup advice for screen recording

[Ronald Houk]

Hi Jennifer,

I don't know if it would fulfill all of your requirements, but it might be
worth taking a look at the open source project "OBS -- Open Broadcast
Software" at https://obsproject.com/index

It can handle multiple inputs like webcams + screen recording.

On Thu, Apr 7, 2016 at 7:32 PM, Jennifer DeJonghe <
jennifer.dejon...@metrostate.edu> wrote:

> I'm at a small public university and we do regular pop up usability
> testing, but want to purchase Morae and start doing some screen capturing.
> Since the license is rather expensive, I'm trying to do as much "sharing"
> among staff as I can within the bounds of what TechSmith allows and what is
> practical. I talked to TEchSmith person today, and they allow you to have
> multiple people using it on a shared computer. Your license gets you one
> copy of the Morae Manager, and unlimited copies of Recorder and Observer.
>
> My question for those of you who have Morae... Do you think it would be
> practical or advisable to install the single copy of Manager on a laptop,
> so that the laptop could be shared between multiple departments in various
> buildings? You don't use Manager during the actual testing, it is more for
> set up and analysis, so they said most people install that on their "good"
> computer. But installing it on a laptop might mean we could get more use
> from it. Is there anything I should think about before proceeding with
> this? We don't have a usability lab, so would probably purchase a dedicated
> shared laptop(s) for this. (I know I could use cheaper software, but I just
> got back from ER&L and was impressed with what I saw people doing with the
> TechSmith product.)
>
> Jennifer
>
> Jennifer DeJonghe
> Librarian and Professor
> Metropolitan State University
> St. Paul, MN
>



-- 
Ronald Houk ☕
Assistant Director
Ottumwa Public Library
102 W. Fourth Street
Ottumwa, IA 52501
(641)682-7563x203
rh...@ottumwapubliclibrary.org

Re: [CODE4LIB] Morae setup advice for screen recording

[Andreas Orphanides]

A couple other options: If you can keep each test under 5 minutes, you
could use Jing -- you can even enable the microphone to capture
think-aloud. I think on Macs, Quicktime is pretty good at doing screen
capturing, though I don't know if it will capture audio at the same time.
Camtasia would presumably work well, as Kari points out, and you could even
turn on mouse highlighting in post. Captivate probably has similar features
to Camtasia (though I know less about its screen cap capabilities).



On Fri, Apr 8, 2016 at 12:08 PM, Ronald Houk  wrote:

> Hi Jennifer,
>
> I don't know if it would fulfill all of your requirements, but it might be
> worth taking a look at the open source project "OBS -- Open Broadcast
> Software" at https://obsproject.com/index
>
> It can handle multiple inputs like webcams + screen recording.
>
> On Thu, Apr 7, 2016 at 7:32 PM, Jennifer DeJonghe <
> jennifer.dejon...@metrostate.edu> wrote:
>
> > I'm at a small public university and we do regular pop up usability
> > testing, but want to purchase Morae and start doing some screen
> capturing.
> > Since the license is rather expensive, I'm trying to do as much "sharing"
> > among staff as I can within the bounds of what TechSmith allows and what
> is
> > practical. I talked to TEchSmith person today, and they allow you to have
> > multiple people using it on a shared computer. Your license gets you one
> > copy of the Morae Manager, and unlimited copies of Recorder and Observer.
> >
> > My question for those of you who have Morae... Do you think it would be
> > practical or advisable to install the single copy of Manager on a laptop,
> > so that the laptop could be shared between multiple departments in
> various
> > buildings? You don't use Manager during the actual testing, it is more
> for
> > set up and analysis, so they said most people install that on their
> "good"
> > computer. But installing it on a laptop might mean we could get more use
> > from it. Is there anything I should think about before proceeding with
> > this? We don't have a usability lab, so would probably purchase a
> dedicated
> > shared laptop(s) for this. (I know I could use cheaper software, but I
> just
> > got back from ER&L and was impressed with what I saw people doing with
> the
> > TechSmith product.)
> >
> > Jennifer
> >
> > Jennifer DeJonghe
> > Librarian and Professor
> > Metropolitan State University
> > St. Paul, MN
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Ronald Houk ☕
> Assistant Director
> Ottumwa Public Library
> 102 W. Fourth Street
> Ottumwa, IA 52501
> (641)682-7563x203
> rh...@ottumwapubliclibrary.org
>

Re: [CODE4LIB] Software used in Panama Papers Analysis

[Jenn C]

I worked on a text mining project last semester where I had a bunch of
magazines with text that was totally unstructured (from IA). I would have
really liked to know how to work entity matching into such a project. Are
there text mining projects out there that demonstrate doing this?

On Fri, Apr 8, 2016 at 11:08 AM, diego ferreyra 
wrote:

> I think controlled vocabularies can be used to improve text-minning
> process, to entities recongnition (persons, institutions and critical
> concepts) ... I think thats... but I'm a not neutral about this because
> I am developer of a controlled vocabularies tool :)
>
> Sorry about my english :/
>
> 2016-04-08 3:24 GMT-03:00 Eric Lease Morgan :
>
> > On Apr 7, 2016, at 4:24 PM, Gregory Markus 
> > wrote:
> >
> > >> from one of the New York Times stories on the Panama Papers: "The
> > >> ICIJ made a number of powerful research tools available to the
> > >> consortium that the group had developed for previous leak
> > >> investigations. Those included a secure, Facebook-type forum
> > >> where reporters could post the fruits of their research, as well
> > >> as database search program called “Blacklight” that allowed the
> > >> teams to hunt for specific names, countries or sources.”
> > >>
> > >>
> >
> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/business/media/how-a-cryptic-message-interested-in-data-led-to-the-panama-papers.html
> > >
> > >
> >
> https://ijnet.org/en/blog/how-icij-pulled-large-scale-cross-border-investigative-collaboration
> >
> >
> > Based on my VERY quick read of the articles linked above, a group of
> > people created a collaborative system for collecting, indexing,
> searching,
> > and analyzing data/information. In the end, they facilitated the creation
> > of knowledge. That sure sounds like a library to me. Kudos! I believe our
> > profession has many things to learn from this example, and two of those
> > things include: 1) you need full text content, and 2) controlled
> > vocabularies are not a necessary component of the system. —ELM
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Diego Ferreyra
>

Re: [CODE4LIB] Software used in Panama Papers Analysis

[diego ferreyra]

I think controlled vocabularies can be used to improve text-minning
process, to entities recongnition (persons, institutions and critical
concepts) ... I think thats... but I'm a not neutral about this because
I am developer of a controlled vocabularies tool :)

Sorry about my english :/

2016-04-08 3:24 GMT-03:00 Eric Lease Morgan :

> On Apr 7, 2016, at 4:24 PM, Gregory Markus 
> wrote:
>
> >> from one of the New York Times stories on the Panama Papers: "The
> >> ICIJ made a number of powerful research tools available to the
> >> consortium that the group had developed for previous leak
> >> investigations. Those included a secure, Facebook-type forum
> >> where reporters could post the fruits of their research, as well
> >> as database search program called “Blacklight” that allowed the
> >> teams to hunt for specific names, countries or sources.”
> >>
> >>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/business/media/how-a-cryptic-message-interested-in-data-led-to-the-panama-papers.html
> >
> >
> https://ijnet.org/en/blog/how-icij-pulled-large-scale-cross-border-investigative-collaboration
>
>
> Based on my VERY quick read of the articles linked above, a group of
> people created a collaborative system for collecting, indexing, searching,
> and analyzing data/information. In the end, they facilitated the creation
> of knowledge. That sure sounds like a library to me. Kudos! I believe our
> profession has many things to learn from this example, and two of those
> things include: 1) you need full text content, and 2) controlled
> vocabularies are not a necessary component of the system. —ELM
>



-- 
Diego Ferreyra

Re: [CODE4LIB] Morae setup advice for screen recording

[Kari R Smith]

If your university used WebEx you can use that for screen recording.  And 
Camtasia is also a good solution.

Kari Smith

-Original Message-
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of 
Jennifer DeJonghe
Sent: Thursday, April 07, 2016 8:33 PM
To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: [CODE4LIB] Morae setup advice for screen recording

I'm at a small public university and we do regular pop up usability testing, 
but want to purchase Morae and start doing some screen capturing. Since the 
license is rather expensive, I'm trying to do as much "sharing" among staff as 
I can within the bounds of what TechSmith allows and what is practical. I 
talked to TEchSmith person today, and they allow you to have multiple people 
using it on a shared computer. Your license gets you one copy of the Morae 
Manager, and unlimited copies of Recorder and Observer. 

My question for those of you who have Morae... Do you think it would be 
practical or advisable to install the single copy of Manager on a laptop, so 
that the laptop could be shared between multiple departments in various 
buildings? You don't use Manager during the actual testing, it is more for set 
up and analysis, so they said most people install that on their "good" 
computer. But installing it on a laptop might mean we could get more use from 
it. Is there anything I should think about before proceeding with this? We 
don't have a usability lab, so would probably purchase a dedicated shared 
laptop(s) for this. (I know I could use cheaper software, but I just got back 
from ER&L and was impressed with what I saw people doing with the TechSmith 
product.) 

Jennifer  

Jennifer DeJonghe
Librarian and Professor
Metropolitan State University
St. Paul, MN

Re: [CODE4LIB] Islandora & Vagrant - Development use only?

[Harnum, Alan]

While I can’t comment on the Islandora piece, I’ll make the following comments 
about Vagrant in the context of how we use it as part of our development and 
ops process:

- Vagrant is used as described below for “disposable environments and 
consistent workflow” for testing our automation scripts and tools - we use 
fairly barebones Vagrantfiles to bring up VMs that match our production 
environment targets, then provision those with the same Ansible playbook 
intended to be used in production. This lets us rapidly develop and test our 
automation before turning it loose on an environment outside our local machines

- production servers are also virtual machines, using KVM on Red Hat; these get 
provisioned with the same Ansible playbooks developed initially using Vagrant. 
There’s nothing inherently unsound about the idea of running using virtual 
machines in production, provided you understand the reasons behind and accept 
the overhead of doing so (in our case, our production VMs are launched and 
managed on a large, dedicated cluster intended for virtualization)

- it’s possible the idea is to use Vagrant as a virtual machine management 
solution in production; I agree with others below that this isn’t an optimal 
solution, nor I think would Vagrant’s creators (I personally Hashicorp has 
blurred the lines on this in recent years as they try to extend their business 
model, which may be where some of this is coming from)

- if the position is that Vagrant is the same class of environment isolation 
tool as RVM or virtualenv, that’s a misunderstanding; RVM or virtualenv create 
isolated environments with very little overhead running on the same system, 
while Vagrant creates virtual machines with all the overhead that entails

ALAN HARNUM
SENIOR INCLUSIVE DEVELOPER
INCLUSIVE DESIGN RESEARCH CENTRE, OCAD UNIVERSITY

E ahar...@ocadu.ca

On Apr 7, 2016, at 1:56 PM, Annamarie C Klose 
mailto:ackl...@frostburg.edu>> wrote:

Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on this issue. I've posted my 
question to the Islandora Google group, as well. I'll be meeting with my 
university's IT department on Monday. I appreciate your help!

Anna

-Original Message-
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Cindi 
Blyberg
Sent: Wednesday, April 06, 2016 5:46 PM
To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Islandora & Vagrant - Development use only?

Cary, the snippet to your email as shown in my inbox only showed the first 
sentence. Glad to read the rest! :)

On Wed, Apr 6, 2016 at 2:01 PM, Cary Gordon 
mailto:listu...@chillco.com>> wrote:

I disagree with the statement that "Vagrant is not a good idea for
production.” Vagrant is a terrible idea for production, and it is not
designed for that.

We use Ansible to build Islandora, and, after three years of talking
about it we are starting to use it with Docker. We are an AWS shop, so
we use Docker with AWS elastic container service, which could come in
handy if one of your archives gets slashdotted.

Cary

On Apr 6, 2016, at 8:53 AM, Chris Fitzpatrick
mailto:chrisfitz...@gmail.com>>
wrote:

Vagrant is not a good idea for production. It's really for people to
work against a copy of the production environment.
Like you can use Vagrant, then update a ansible or puppet or chef
script then deploy that to yr VM.
Hashicorp is making something called Otto which is supposed to
replace Vagrant for end-to-end deployments like this, but that's in alpha now.

Vagrant isn't  like virtualenv at all. Virtualenv is a way to
maintain Python dependencies by mucking around with some environment variables.
It's
more like Ruby's bundler.

It's kinda more like Docker. Docker makes linux containers. Nobody
knows what those are, but they work great.

I've seen Vagrant used in production and it supposedly worked well
but
the
guy who set it up left and things went bad. It wasn't a performance
issue,
it's just really hard for the replacement to figure out what's going on.
Use Vagrant with Ansible/Puppet/Chef. Or use Docker. Or use all of
that, for the win.



On Wed, Apr 6, 2016 at 3:55 PM, Francis Kayiwa 
mailto:kay...@pobox.com>> wrote:

On 4/6/16 9:49 AM, Annamarie C Klose wrote:

Hi, all,

Can anyone provide a technical explanation as to why it is not
appropriate to install Islandora on a public server with Vagrant?
Despite
all the documentation instructing that Vagrant is for development
only, my
university's IT department thinks Vagrant makes Islandora more
secure
for
production use. They have also stated "Vagrant is used to keep
dependencies
separate on machines in the same way Pythons Virtualenv or Ruby's
Docker
is." Unfortunately, secure networking is outside of my expertise.
I'm concerned that Vagrant's virtualization is a poor substitute
for the
real
thing. Before I add hundreds of records to Islandora, I'd like to
make
sure
that I'm building my library's digital collections on a