Finding Aid Query (FAQ) Program V1.6

This is my ‘final’ version of my program, although it doesn’t work the way I would like,

In this program I successfully managed to,

• Use a dictionary to allow the user to see the series in a collection
• Allow the user to see the number of items in each series.

I think that had I had a little bit more time I could have gotten the custom class ‘Dates’ up and running, but I was far too ambitious in my initial scope. I wanted a function that would allow the user to request the dates at three levels, (1) Series, (2) Subseries, and (3) File (or item) level.

Finding Aid Query (FAQ) Program V1.5

In this program I had a clean structure for my program set up and I was satisfied with, but I should have prioritized the actual functions.

• How the program handled bad input at various stages
• How the Menu and Help text displayed
• How the exit function was working (Although I tried to allow it to loop back to main I realized that the user will only be able to change their mind once.)

Reflection

First I’d like to address the milestones and the final project, and I’d like to close with a paragraph with a reflection on the class as a whole and my future coding goals. Here are the milestones I was aiming at before class on Monday,

Program Capabilities

• Import three .csv files that correspond to finding aids I’ve created
• Reimport three .csv files with standardized columns
• Detect data that may cause errors “& …” (Function 3)
• Can use collection dictionary to display information about the collection
• Can use dictionary of dictionaries to display information about collections
• [ ] [ ] Have “Help” returns at each level of each functions.
• Visualize data via text printouts
• Custom class utilization

User Abilitities

• User can discover the series that make up the collection (Function 1)
• User can ask how many items are in a series (Function 2)
• User can discover the dates for a series (Function 4)
• User can discover the dates for the collection (Function 4)
• User can discover the dates for items (Function 4)

I knew that I put off a lot of the gruntwork for this project to the last few days, and I regret that. It caused me to encounter a lot of scope errors and made the fruit of my labor very ugly. That said I am pretty pround of the output. I feel that I ‘hacked’ until my program spat out what I wanted it to.

For each of the functions I have some ideas of how to improve them that I’d like to list below,

Function 1 - Collection Explorer

At this point the function merely prints off the series and number of items in each series.

Function 2 - Bad Data Discovery

This function is non functional at the moment. It was the first idea I had when thinking about what I wanted to do with this data. If I were to work on this program for many more months this would be my main objective. I would need to learn more about unicode characters, the program we use to convert .CSV files to EAD XML files, and what characters throw errors in ArchivesSpace.

Function 3 - Date Range

This was a very challenging aspect of the program because I wanted to use a custom class for dates so I could use it for every level. I definitly should have thought more about how difficult this was going to be and how much time it was going to take. I figured that since I would be working with numbers that it would be easier than coding other aspects, but I didn’t factor in how I would utilize user input.

Function 4 - Help

It was with this function that I began to see my code output starting to look like a recognizable text program, and I got excited. I would have liked to be able to make this menu accessible from anywhere in the program by typing ‘help’.

Reflection

This class has really challenged me. The piece of feedback that has been ringing in my mind since I read it was when professor Hauser said, “I don’t get a sense that you’ve been able to carve out enough time to fully engage with this course from your life.” I feel that that was a very accurate and honest statement about my efforts in the class, and after reading this I really tried to come to class more prepared. I always tried to be as engaged as possible with in class lessons, but still felt that my out of class work was lacking. I also feel that my communication was lacking, and I didn’t fully utilize Professor Hauser as a resource. I sometimes felt that I didn’t want to ask simple questions over email, because the answers could be found in the readings. I tried to ask questions during class that would illustrate concepts and connections.

That said I am very satisfied with what I learned from this class. I persevered through confusion and frustration and feel well equipted to continue with my programming education. I remain interested in data visualization and I have a strong desire to explore anaconda on my desktop PC and peruse some Jupyter notebooks. I have been subscribed to /r/DataVisualization for a while now, but have only ever looked at the output of posts and said to myself, “cool”, so I hope thhat now I can actually explore data visualizations that I am interested in and learn something. And I have subscribed to /r/programming so I can keep abreast of news and occasionally peruse articles that interest me with terms I recognize in the headline. I am going to think of this next year like the first year that Professor Hauser spent following Hacker news. I need to build a vocabulary and explore the field so I can gain an appreciation for what is (1) professionally relevant, and (2) personally interesting to me.

This was an intense class and while programming interests me I don’t think that I will really be able to study it and learn it in any great detail until I graduate about a year from now. I want to stay sharp however so I don’t loose what I learned in this class. The way that I intend to do that is to take Databases in the Fall. I have worked in several databases, but I feel that this class is going to be invaluable to my professional career as an archivist.