Elias Tzoc blog!

I was recently back in Guatemala for 11 days!

For the first 4-5 days, I was part of one of the three annual CoEd tours. CoEd is an NGO funded in 1996 now with offices in Cincinnati, Ohio and Guatemala; it’s a great example of organizations that have grown over the years and expanded their programs for kids in elementary and middle schools.  One of the new programs is “Culture of Reading” and it’s focused on developing the habit of reading and critical thinking for kids in K-2 grade.

This tour was a great opportunity to: a) listen to those kids and learn about their goals/expectations for a better education in the future; and b) get to know people who are working/helping with educational initiatives in many parts of the world.  Will I go back for another CoEd tour? Yes, …and hopefully with some friends too.

While I was there -on August 4 at 9 am- I had an important and productive meeting with Thelma Porres –Archive Coordinator at CIRMA.  In the last two years, Thelma and I have exchanged emails and talked about the Musica Colonial project.  Well, this time I finally met and showed her the prototype record we’ve created for this collection.  I know it’s a big –complex- project and it’ll take us a few years to get it completed; but this collection has been, will be, in a special place in my list because:

• is originally from Guatemala
• is the oldest collection we housed (from the 18th century)
• is a collaborative project among CIRMA and at least 3 Miami University Departments:  Spanish & Portuguese, Music, and U. Libraries
• requires/incorporates some really interesting programming scripting techniques such as: conversion from TIFF to DjVu or PDF, batch generation of files for populating a CONTENTdm collection, and producing audio files from manuscript music records.

I was very happy to get a couple of names of music experts who have done some metadata work for this collection, in the next few weeks I hope to get in touch with them and hopefully we all can share what we’ve done and collaborate for the next –perhaps final- phase of this project.

…and of course, I spent my last 4 days in Toto! –visiting some family, relatives, friends as well as an unplanned –and very successful- visit at CDRO.

This month (July 2009) started with a couple of changes in my “regular” DiVeRsItY world.

First, for two years I served as a member of the Library Diversity Cluster, now I’ve been asked to coordinate it.  In a recent meeting with our new members, we’ve agreed to explore other types of events to promote “diversity” among library staff as well as continue with some of the on going events -film screening & discussion and the African American Read-In.

Second, on July 8-10 I attended the 2009 Spectrum Institute sponsored by the ALA-Diversity Office.  It was a great opportunity to:

• see -again- some former classmates, meet new people, and especially hear/talk/learn about successful diversity initiatives in the field of librarianship
• expand an early idea of a research project “accessibility/usability of unique collections for users with physical disabilities”
• meet with a couple of leaders of the Library & Information Technology Association (LITA) and the International Relations Round Table (IRRT)

…and speaking of diversity, here are some examples of how this topic has been part of my work in the last few months:

• Freedom Summer, a new collection -grant funded- which aims to give scholars and students better access to materials about the civil rights movement of 1964.
• Shakespeare collection, one of the most unique/diverse/popular collection, visitors are coming from all over the world -http://digital.lib.muohio.edu/shakespeare/
• Library Resources, I used to maintain a list of diversity-related resources on the cluster website, but now we’re planning to move it to a more robust system (libguides)
• Library service, I’m co-leading a website team for the Freedom Summer National Conference to be held at Miami University in October 2009.
• Volunteer work, in my spare time I’ve been working on a couple of flashcard projects for kids in elementary schools in rural Guatemala.

Anyhow, I enjoy working with the people and being -direct or indirectly- part of these diversity initiatives …look forward to keeping in touch with everyone!

Last week, I was back in Austin TX for a few days and attended the 2009 Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL). It was nice to be back at UT and have those formal and informal conversations with friends, former professors and other participants.

The conference had two keynote speakers: Christine Borgman and Gerhard Fischer. Borgman talked a bit about the Cyberlearning report from NSF as well as the benefits of a well developed network/system according to users’ expectations. Fischer talked about (among other things) the changing role of users -from consumers to producers. As users become more technology literate, they are more open and will expect to have a channel of communication and be able to contribute to the content. For some, one concern is the quality of contribution from the general public, perhaps this where educational/specialized institutions can balance/disseminate the information/knowledge being produced in those online communities.

There were two panels: What Should We Preserve from a Born-Digital World? and Google as Library Redux. The importance of continually revise file formats and run processes of importing/exporting metadata across multiple Content Management Systems was part of the talk.  Another topic with some attention was the revision/customization of metadata schemas as a tool to support interoperability.   Perhaps, our own flickr project can be a “basic” example of an external discovery layer for local collections as well as a content migration from a local to a web-based system.

Given our current work plan for the Scholarly Commons Project as well as the integration of a discovery layer of Digital Collections using the new library interface, I found and attended three related sessions: Large-scale ETD repositories: A case study of a digital library application, Models for Faceted User Interfaces, and What Do Exploratory Searchers Look at in a Faceted Search Interface? The first session was a good example of an existing repository based on DSpace and with multiple institutions as contributors. Many of the technical aspects of this project would be -is already- part of the DRC project at OhioLINK. The other two sessions covered issues that we will probably have to deal with when we integrate our digital collections to the new library website.

Other sessions I attended include: generating metadata by analyzing document code, trends in digital libraries, user interface for search and retrieval in video libraries, flexible content model for media repositories, enhancing social tagging for discovery, improving optical character recognition through efficient multiple system alignment, and improving historical research by linking digital library information on specialized sources.

In conclusion, it was very interesting and worthwhile –registration was kind of expensive though. The little USB with the conference logo and the conference proceedings is and will be valuable in the near future –I hope. Will I go to Australia next year? who knows, but I should be back to another JCDL sometime in the future!

Yesterday, I attended and co-presented at the SOA 2009 Conference in Colombus, OH. The conference theme was Archival Access and Accessibility: Tradition & Technology. The day started with two concurrent sessions, I attended the Ohio Newspaper Digitization Project presentation –just learned that the digitization process is being done by iArchives. This project is part of the National Digital Newspaper Program and the digital content will be included in the Chronicling America database.

For the Welcome & Plenary, we listened to Jill Hurst-Wahl -also known as the author of the Digitization 101 blog. The title of her presentation was “What We Are Learning From Google & Flickr About Digitization and Partnership.” Regarding the Google digitization project, she talked about issues like: Access vs Preservation or Quantity vs Quality. When viewing a page in Google Book, the quality of the image may not be the best one, but the page will most likely include links to sites where users can buy an original copy of the book or request it from a library –if available. Perhaps a good example of “easy and quick access.” She also talked about Flickr as an example of a site that “allows people to participate and help” describe images. The Flickr Commons project might be the best example for this.

Bottom line: we must focus on users, which also implies:

• help them find what they’re looking for
• be where they are
• increase items’ visibility –should I say findability?

Last but not least, in the afternoon, I was part of panel “Bringing Local
Archival Collections into the Digital Age: Using CONTENTdm to organize, describe, and provide access to archival collections.” Jenny Presnell and I talked about the Miami Stories Oral History Project -including the recent additions of transcripts (example); and the Miami Digital Archive.

BTW: …after testing some online free file conversion, here are the links to my slides:

• PDF -converted from pptx to pdf using zamzar.com
• FlashPaper -converted from pdf to swf using pdfmenot.com

That’s it for now!

In January 2009, Jacky Johnson -Western College Archivist- and I submitted a grant proposal to the Ohio Humanities Council (OHC) to digitize the Freedom Summer collection currently housed at the Western Memorial Archives.  The primary materials include journals, diaries and letters written by the college students and civil rights participants in the training in Oxford, Ohio.

Currently, users who want to access the collection must visit the Western Memorial Archives and browse the collection manually.  However, in April we received the award letter and the work is already in progress.  By the end of September 2009, we plan to launch the Freedom Summer Digital Collection (FSDC).

In the last two weeks, I’ve spent some hours working on the project planning and workflow. Obviously, I’ve been consulting with colleagues, testing file settings, and contacting students who will help us scan documents and convert videos.

The FSDC will provide users to:

a)  search –either at the collection or page level
b)  browse by topic, name, or place
c)  print transcript of manuscripts or video interviews

The digitization project aims to create a dynamic and friendly website for students and researchers as well as help preserve the originals.