What courses would it be worth me doing?

83 views
Skip to first unread message

James Elder

unread,
Sep 25, 2020, 7:57:38 AM9/25/20
to AtoM Users
Hello

I am a qualified archivist and, outside my day job in a corporate archive, I am now looking after the archive of my rowing club 

As it's a volunteer project, I'm working entirely on my own with no IT support.

A couple of years ago I got a site up and running with AtoM 2.4 on a rented VPS (www.thamesrcarchive.co.uk). Although I've got a long way by following the excellent instructions in the AtoM documentation, I feel that I need to improve my confidence working with Linux in order to get some better backup arrangements in place and then to upgrade to AtoM 2.6

I have started working my way through some Udemy online courses on the Linux command line, Ubuntu server basics, and securing an Ubuntu VPS.

I am wondering, though, whether it be worth also taking courses on any of the software that underlies AtoM. Udemy offers courses (primarily aimed at developers, I think) on:

NGINX
MySQL
ElasticSearch
PHP
Symfony

Would it be worth my while taking any of these? Or anything else?

Any suggestions welcomed!

James Elder

Dan Gillean

unread,
Sep 28, 2020, 1:52:29 PM9/28/20
to ICA-AtoM Users
Hi James, 

If you're interested mostly in maintaining a site (rather than customizing AtoM and/or developing new features), then learning more about MySQL and Nginx would likely be the most useful of your list, in addition to familiarizing yourself with the unix/linux command-line. 

In general, I'd say that a basic understanding of the command-line, Ubuntu, Nginx, and web-based applications will help - but a lot of what will help you the most is likely more about understanding AtoM, rather than understanding its specific components deeply. A couple of AtoM resources that might help you along the way:

First, very general, but might be useful for both maintaining and using AtoM - see this slide deck: 
A very high-level diagram of the components that make up AtoM:
We have created our own Command-line 101 slide deck here to help archivists with basic CLI navigation: 
If you'd like to set up a localAtoM test instance you can maintain on a laptop for testing, we maintain a Vagrant box that can be set up fairly easily. See: 
This could be useful even just for testing the commands to create a sqldump of your data, copy out your uploads and download directories, and then load them back into a clean site (i.e. all the steps needed for data backup, and/or upgrading). 

Anyone maintaining an AtoM site should familiarize themselves somewhat with our command-line tools. See: 
A lot of these commands are referenced on a page we maintain for Troubleshooting, which will hopefully help with common issues you might encounter:
If you'd like a general sense of AtoM's codebase and how things work, there are some handy links in previous threads I've shared for developers, like the "General resources" section in this previous post: 
If you're interested in understanding AtoM's database structure and how to manage it, see: 
If you want to know more about how AtoM's Elasticsearch-based search index is organized - including how you can use that knowledge to perform some expert searches not directly supported via user interface elements, see: 
Hope this helps!

Cheers, 

Dan Gillean, MAS, MLIS
AtoM Program Manager
Artefactual Systems, Inc.
604-527-2056
@accesstomemory
he / him


--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "AtoM Users" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to ica-atom-user...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ica-atom-users/c0ed99a8-4a7b-458b-b203-39802d7ca60an%40googlegroups.com.

James Elder

unread,
Sep 29, 2020, 10:27:30 AM9/29/20
to AtoM Users
Thanks Dan. That's extremely helpful.

All the best

James

Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages