Elias Tzoc blog!

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!

Today -September 30- is the official last day for this 5 months project!
It all started last year (2008) when Jacky Johnson and I learned about the OHC grant opportunity. The grant was awarded in April 2009, in May we reviewed some students’ applications and hired 2 students; the actual work started on June 1 – September 30!

The collection contains three types of materials: documents (about 765 PDFs), 68 images, and 27 videos (about 40 hours). Users can explore the website by browsing the collection (either by type or tagcloud) or by using the autosuggest search box on the homepage!  The slideshow on the main page uses SlideShowPro for Flash –which is a great application, fully customizable and easy to use.

Another addition to this collection is the “curriculum guide” page –here you can find lesson plans for elementary-middle-high-college levels.  This was part of workshop that Jacky thought this past summer.

It was a great experience -as usual with some challenges and unexpected surprises- however, we’re happy to see this project completed. In the next few days, we’ll doing a couple of presentations about this collection –e.g. one at the ASALH 2009 Annual Meeting in Cincinnati, OH and another one on Saturday October 10, at the Freedom Summer Conference at Miami University.

…hasta pronto!

Miami University Libraries launched a new website in August 2009 –and as part of the “web-design consistency” idea, we recently adapted the new look-and-feel to the Scholarly Commons project.  After all, consistency “makes sense” and it makes sites easier to use …in part because visitors don’t have to learn new tricks as they move around.

Anyway, the real work required some extra hours of -fun- editing/testing.  The power of CSS for web presentation was evident; I’d say that about 90% of the new look is purely based on CSS rules.  Getting the right DIV dimensions, font attributes was part of the challenge too, and that’s where 2 FireFox add-ons became extremely useful. ColorZilla is great color picker tool and Firebug is the perfect search/find tool for those unique DSpace DIV elements.

Of course, there were a couple of XSLT tricks as well.  For instance, DSpace -by default- displays 2 search boxes on the front page –not sure why?  But we only needed one, the challenge was how to remove/hide the search box on the <div id=”ds-body”> section …this was one required some extra searching/reading.  To make a long story short, the trick was to add a line of code in the theme.xsl file, restart tomcat and done!

<xsl:template match="dri:div[@n='front-page-search']">&#160;</xsl:template>

The last part of the work was the easiest one, just zip the new theme folder and send to OhioLINK, they replaced the old theme folder and bingo!

…now, in order to be -really- consistent, we should probably start thinking about another “re-design” …this time, for the Digital Collections website –oh well, that’s part of the to-do list already.

Quick note:

To give users the option of either password or LDPA login, add this line to the dspace.cfg file (look for Stackable Authentication Methods around line 294)

org.dspace.authenticate.LDAPAuthentication

Since I’ve officially moved to the Mac OS world -at least from 8-5;
the last few days have been quite interesting, learning/finding/exploring keyboard shortcuts and plug-ins.  And for one of the projects we’re working on, we need to populate a CONTENTdm collection with PDF files.  Well, in Windows most browsers will display a PDF file inline.  However, that’s not always the case on the Mac, maybe in Safari but not FireFox.

The good news is: there is a solution available at http://code.google.com/p/firefox-mac-pdf/
This plug-in uses PDFKit to display PDFs in FireFox on the Mac OS,
…now PDFs are displayed inside the browser!

…mmm, maybe it’s time to check/find a similar plug-in for browsers in Linux, we’ll see!

BTW: the http://www.opensourcemac.org/ is a great site for open-source software for the Mac OS X