Elias Tzoc blog!

It’s now Monday, January 6, and I was supposed to be back on campus … but the extremely cold weather conditions forced/convinced me to stay home and here I’m starting a new year with some early notes for 2014.  Last year was quite successful and busy, the debut of the Center for Digital Scholarship allowed us to start working on more intentional collaborative work with faculty … among our first examples are: a new website for the Digital Literacy Partnership project with V. Ubbes, a digital archive for the CAWC lecture Series with MJ Berman, an e-book project on Digital Composition with H MacKee, and an NEH grant proposal with AE Armstrong and B de Schutter … as with most projects, what we’ve accomplished so far is a good start and it exemplifies what can be done, but if we want to do more … then time and resources will be part of what we’ll need … and this is where writing some grant proposals seems to be part of my to-do list for the first semester of this year.

Writing grant proposals and articles for publication can be fun, engaging and very rewarding  –but I have to say that from time to time, I do wonder what if I can spend more time writing “pure code” … oh well, this is one of the ongoing dilemmas I have whenever I try to plan for a new year.  On one hand, finding the right balance between writing code and the other type of writing can be a bit tricky; on the other hand, my 2013 dossier definitely looked better when I had some decent entries in each type of writing.

Bottom line -and at least for now- my current plan for this new year will include: writing 2-3 articles, the first one is currently in progress and due in about two months; 1-2 grant proposals, one of which is also due in late February; help deploy a DSpace 4.0 instance and decipher/customize the JSPUI new interface; get back to some Drupal development and help with the library website redesign; get a better understanding of the bootstrap framework; work and maybe publish a plugin for Omeka or WordPress; and also wait about some very important paperwork decisions later this year

For now, this is it, stay warm and felicidades!

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