When I started this course I felt pretty knowledgeable about the in's and out's of Digital Repositories. I realized I didn't know much about the back end of things but really didn't think to much about it, since our developers generally handle that stuff.
I think quite differently now. The back end "is" the repository and how you set up your system's architecture is crucial to the maintenance, delivery, and organization of the data you are trying to present. The most helpful aspect has been looking at what you are building and determining, in advance, what you plan to do with it and how you will get there.
Pre-planning with functional requirements, data modeling, and just having concrete goals are paramount and I have already been integrating those aspects in what I am doing right now.
I also have a much greater understanding (not complete of course) and respect for the programmers, developers, and system administrators I work with everyday. A digital repository isn't just about a clean interface and fancy widgets but robust relations between objects and efficient ways of getting to them.
I can have conversations and attend meetings where topics like our database infrastructure (Fedora, MySQL, PHP, etc.) don't make my eyes glaze over.
I also realize I have much more to learn and must always be educating myself on the technologies and examining the functional goals of collections and interfaces we propose. This is something that will be a constant in any digital enterprise I participate in.
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