Elias Tzoc blog!

Well, maybe the title should be “before Pico, now Vi” because …after a few years of using Pico as my default editor, now I’m slowly convincing myself to use Vi.  Here is why:  even though Pico is a lot easier to use and learn, these days I’m editing some huge XML and XSLT files.  I often need to replace a word in an entire file and that’s something I cannot do in Pico; whereas in Vi this is what I need:

%s/old_word/new_word/g

Another Vi function I’m using lately is the invocation of a shell while editing a file, sometimes after a quick change I need to restart a service or while editing a file I need to get the exact variable name from a different file.  In Pico I could have 2 terminal windows open, but in Vi I can do this by typing :! and a command.

:!ls –la
:!restart

Ok, now I know, …a big part of this change has to do with my recent move to the Mac environment, in the past I used to just download a file to my desktop and edit it in Notepad++, I cannot do that on the Mac Instead, I found and installed Vim –an extension of Vi- and so far it’s working fine.

…hope to post some more Vi tricks as I learn my way through!

As a result of an initiative started in 2007, this week (Oct. 19-23 2009) many institutions -around the world- are celebrating Open Access Week.

“Open Access Week is an opportunity to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access to research, including access policies from all types of research funders, within the international higher education community and the general public. The now-annual event has been expanded from a single day to accommodate widespread global interest in the movement toward open, public access to scholarly research results.”
http://www.openaccessweek.org/

There are different types of events going on this week, from blog comments to videoconferences.  A couple of examples:

• A SPARC Open Access 101 - video
  
• International Open Access Week in Germany
• EDUCAUSE videoconference “Throwing Open the Doors: Strategies and Implications for Open Access” scheduled for Friday Oct. 23, 2009
  http://net.educause.edu/live0919
• …and of course some are simply twettering

Last but not least, in developing countries, OA has the -potential- to help reduce the “information-gap”; in some cases, a translation of the original document might be necessary, but I think that’s an area where researchers and language tools will work on.

It’s almost mid October -fall break is just around the corner- and here I’m still trying to finish up with some last summer and early-fall assignments before I can move on. For the rest of this semester, I’ll be working on more DSpace “tweakings” –it should be fun and entertaining, I was checking my to-do list early today and guess what? That list continues to grow on.  In fact, the very last item –as of today- is the documentation of the early work we’ve done here at Miami and a (possible) presentation at one of the monthly DRC meetings at OhioLINK in a couple of months

Some of the customizations in our plan includes: unique themes and customizations for individual collections/communities, flexibility in displaying/hiding metadata fields at the collection level, faculty profile pages for the Scholarly Commons Project, re-indexing metadata using a combination of SOLR-DRUPAL, web-stats at the item level using XMLUI, and others!  For most of this work, XSLT will be essential as well as those great tutorials already online.

Speaking of searching/reading online, here is a link to the new DuraSpace Blog …and just in case you’re asking yourself, how old is DSpace now? well, take a look at this image –from Google News Archive

see you pronto!