Elias Tzoc blog!

It’s the last day of May and it seems just a good time to update this blog with some notes on recent and current activities -items are in somewhat a chronological order

A NEW look for Scholarly Commons, in late April we completed a theme update to our Scholarly Commons website.  The new interface features a few cosmetic changes: a collapsible sidebar menu for searching and browsing, a box with popular items on the front-page, links to faculty’s profile on the Scholars site, an upgraded share option on the item’s page, and a link to related items in Google Scholar.  BTW: three recent additions to the SC site are: presentations from the 2011 OVGTSL Annual Conference, a video of the Peter Sis: 2012 Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture, and videos/papers from the 2011 National Symposium on Assessment in the Humanities.

Time off for babysitting a newborn, the first 2 weeks of May was 99% devoted to the care of JOTA; he and ESGO are now the reason/motivation to keep coding/tweaking

2012 TEDSIG Workshop, on Friday, May 11th, we hosted the TEDSIG Annual Spring Workshop at OhioNET.  The workshop was on “Technical & Cataloging Skills” and we had 31 people in the room.  We had three presentations: a) From Cataloger to Metadata-er, training library staff for today’s projects; b) From Microfilm to Digital Images: The National Digital Newspaper Program; and c) Batch Cataloging: Improving Access to Your Collection.  Details about the workshop and links to the presentations files are available on the ALAO website.

Article review, in late May I also spent some time working on a couple reviews/changes for my first article in Spanish “El Acceso Abierto en América Latina: Situación Actual y Expectativas de Futuro” which will be published in the upcoming issue of Revista Interamericana de Bibliotecología. This article presents the results of an analysis of the current situation and the future expectations that the Open Access movement can mean for the countries of Latin America -a very interesting finding was the active role that the region has always had on this topic, even before 1990.

Summer plans, three major projects to work on in the next 2-3 months are: development of a DSpace mobile interface, update and re-launch of the Música Colonial Digital Archive, and a major re-design of our Digital Collections website –using CONTENTdm 6.x!  …. oh and most likely finishing up two manuscripts as well

¡nos vemos pronto!

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I recently worked on a DSpace theme with a custom input form for a student project … and it was a good reason to pull (some small) pieces of code I’ve worked on before but I never documented.   In hopes that someday I -or someone else- can find this useful, below are short notes on what I ended-up doing and reusing.

Code for generating value-pairs
When creating a custom input form in DSpace, users can define the kind of interactive widget to put in the form to collect the Dublin Core values.  The input-type options include: onebox, twobox, dropdown, etc.  Details are available in Chapter 14 on the DSpace documentation page.  If you need to create an element with predefined values (e.g. drop down menu), then you’ll need to define a value-pairs section –usually a few lines of XML.  If you’re creating an element with 3-5 values, you may just type everything … but if you’re creating an element with more than 100 values (e.g. list of all majors and minors), you may find this page useful … I’ve re-used this code/page a couple of times in the last month

jQuery for collapsing menus in DSpace
I have also updated this small .js file to include 3 basic behaviors: a) don’t collapse the 1st browse ds-simple-list when viewing the front-page; b) collapse the 1st browse ds-simple-list when viewing individual community/collection pages; and c) only collapse the search box OR don’t collapse anything for logged-in users.  The actual code is in the collapse.js file, and it’s now live on the Scholarly Commons site as well.

Variable with handle for individual collection/community
When creating customized themes, sometimes we just need to get rid of everything that links back to the default DSpace homepage. A workaround that seems to do the trick is the code below, the “coll” variable contains the handle of the active collection or community and it can be re-used anywhere on the theme.xsl file.  An example of this tweak is in action on the horizontal menu on this CPATH Repository page.

<xsl:variable name="coll" select="/dri:document/dri:meta/dri:pageMeta
      /dri:metadata[@element='focus'][@qualifier='container']" />
<xsl:variable name="coll" select="substring-after($coll,'hdl:')"/>
<xsl:variable name="coll" select="concat('/handle/', $coll)"/>
<xsl:value-of select="$coll"/>

Related items in Google Scholar
The latest test was a “Related Items” link added in the itemSummaryView-DIM template.  The idea is to add an extra metadata element that will allow users to click and go to Google Scholar to view related items.  The trick is to get an item’s title, replace all the empty spaces with a + sign and add the new text at the end of the GS URL e.g. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Highlights+survey+nursing+home+industry+trends

… and speaking of re-using things, it seems like the new Open Knowledge Repository of the World Bank will now facilitate the access and re-use of hundreds of publications under their new Open Access Policy -what a great example of an Open Access initiative and a DSpace instance at the international level.

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March seems to be -yet- another month to talk about technical skills.   First, as co-chair of TEDSIG, this week we’re finalizing the details for our upcoming spring workshop on Technical/Cataloguing Skills -which will include three presentations by librarians who have been working/cataloguing digital resources in three important projects at the local, state, and national levels.  The two ultimate goals are: a) to learn about the technical/cataloging skills that have worked for others; and b) to identify existing formal/informal opportunities for learning those skills.  The planning process has been a great reminder that even a one-day event takes some good time for coordinating the details … there will a full event’s page on the ALAO website soon, and a flyer will include the following information:

This month also started with some unique technical questions, on March 1-2 we had a guest -Hsianghui Liu-Spencer, Digital Services Librarian at Carleton College, she was here to talk with us about some of the customization work we implemented in CONTENTdm back in 2009-2010.  For me, it was a great opportunity to “test” some of my scripts and even though they weren’t perfect, I think it’s fair to say that they/we passed the test … working with Hsianghui’s sandbox was another example of the need/importance of having access to a local web-server for basic developments or tests.  This week, it was also nice to reply to an email regarding the Share-It feature for image collections in CONTENTdm, unfortunately, it seems like the back-end files between 4.x and 6.x have changed a lot, so I’m afraid that my code won’t work anymore

Last but not least, the new iPad 3 came also as a reminder to one of our projects for this year, that is, a non-flash based image viewer for multi-page digitized files.  We’re definitely looking at IIPMooViewer … speaking of image viewers, I’ve heard that my article on “Document Viewers for Non‐Born‐Digital Files in DSpace” will be published in the Journal of Digital Information soon … and now, just for fun, if you ever get asked the question “Will the iPad ever get flash support?” a good answer may include this link –written in 2010 by Mr. Jobs.

… happy Friday!

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We all must have heard the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words” … and many of us will probably agree -at least to some extent- with the meaning of this popular phrase.  In fact, I recently used it to justify my reasoning in creating a wireframe to explain several ideas I wanted to share in a single page.  But today, for the sake of fun and under the assumption that a picture is the same as an image, I asked myself a nice/tricky question: “is a GIF animated image worth more than a thousand words? … mmmm probably so

Anyway, back to the title of this post, in today’s multimedia world, moving images or video clips can be very effective ways to communicate an idea, especially for concepts that require some sort of animation.  For instance, the image below is a screenshot of a five minutes video and overview of the content of the article Multi-Cellular Rosettes in the Mouse Visceral Endoderm Facilitate the Ordered Migration of Anterior Visceral Endoderm Cells -the cell transformation process is something that can only be represented in a video … so, is 5 min enough?

Although providing video abstracts to academic publications isn’t as popular -yet- … the recent Emerald’s Video Abstracts Showcase is another example of the potential benefit/use of this new addition to the traditional text format of publications.  In the words of Emerald “Short videos presented by the originator of an article can provide an engaging platform for presenting a broad overview of the content and motivation behind a piece of work.”

Creating -even- video abstracts can be time-consuming, but how about converting text to audio files -perhaps using semi-automated tools.  With all the development in text-to-speech technologies, this seems to be a feasible feature in the near future.  A good example of articles with audio files is the work by the OMICS Publishing Group, where most journals provide access to their publications in multiple formats such as: PDF, HTML, XML, MP3, and others.

In conclusion, audio files can increase accessibility to academic publications -e.g. people with visual impairments could listen to the content.  Ok, now it’s time for me to go back and watch another video tutorial on jQuery … I guess I’m now just “partial” to videos

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Since the last hours of the first month of 2012 will come to an end shortly, I believe it’s ok to remind myself that “YES, time flies!” -especially when you get to enjoy unusual warm weather in January in southern Ohio.  Anyway, my examples of time, priorities, and deadline issues in the last couple of weeks include: replying to old emails saved in my “To-Do” folder; collecting quotes and support letters for a grant proposal; updating a couple of presentation proposals; and postponing this blog post

Some recent good news includes:
The acceptance of two poster proposals I co-authored for the upcoming 2nd JCLC Conference in September in Kansas City, MO.  “JCLC brings together a diverse group of librarians, library staff, library supporters, and community participants to explore issues of diversity in libraries and how they affect the ethnic communities who use our services.”  The poster titles are: Digital Diversity: Seven Examples from Miami University Libraries and Minnesota Institute Reflections: Three Personal Stories.

A couple of minor/recent changes in a DSpace theme for our Digital Collections … having the CSS and JavaScript files on our own machines have proven to be quite useful -at least for now.  This technique may also become useful for one of my tasks in the “DRC in a box” working group -a.k.a. the evaluation, test, and implementation of a collapse option for the elements in the ds-options DIV.  An example is available at http://digitalcollections.lib.muohio.edu.  So the trick is the addition to the following 10 lines … the idea behing this functionality is to help users browse a clean interface in a DSpace repository with many collections/communities.

$(document).ready(function() {
//collapse Search and My Account boxes
$(".ds-option-set:first").hide();
$(".ds-option-set:last").hide();
$(".ds-option-set-head").click(function()
{ $(this).next(".ds-option-set").slideToggle(500); });
//collapse 1st ds-simple-list -usually titled "All of xxxx"
$("div.ds-option-set ul.ds-simple-list:first").hide();
$(".ds-sublist-head").click(function()
{ $(this).next(".ds-simple-list").slideToggle(500); });
});

Getting an audio-text sync prototype to work using HTML5 also seems to open up some great opportunities and potential of use in digital collections/humanities.  I have to say that most of what I know and was able to do was thanks to the emails and conversations I had with Peter DuCharme and his HTML5 Audio Text Sync project.  I know this is where I get partial with our SPARKS proposal, but the transcript and multimedia sync has always been in my “to-do” list … I’m very positive that 2012 will be a good time for some basic work … or maybe for some “not-so-basic” implementations -especially if we get the grant

Last, and since I just updated my notes for my 4th annual review … it was good to reflect on the final outcome of a couple of intended -and a non-intended- collaborative work completed/initiated last year.  Now it’s time to get this post published and perhaps browse the just released issue of the Information Research Magazine

¡Feliz inicio de año!

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