Archive for April, 2014

Spring time and some good news!

As the spring weather has finally arrived … this is probably also a good time to share some project updates and good news that have happened in the last few weeks.  First of all, in late March we learned that our NEH grant proposal was awarded … this project will prototype a location-based game that interprets the Mississippi Summer Project on the site of the 1964 orientation at Western College for Women -now part of Miami University.  For me, it’s also good to be part of some other Freedom Summer initiatives such as the FS Conference website and a companion site for a FS Documentary led by Kathy Conkwright.
FS-2014-conference

Another project that is coming well along is our “long-waited” launch of the CONTENTdm 6.x website … some of the latest updates include: updating the URL pointers for video files and adding a few PHP lines in the “showLink” file as we’re now using the Kaltura hosted/streaming server for the mp4 files; modifying the header div was also necessary for adding a permanent logo/link to our main site and at the same time maintain the ability to add custom headers to individual collections using the web interface.  It’s also nice that now we have Marcus Ladd actively helping us with the web customization.  So in the next few days, check for this new header at http://digital.lib.miamioh.edu/
MUL-DC

Another interesting and recent event was the Access for All Symposium that took place here in King Library just last Friday.  To me the highlight was the session on Video Captioning … the presenter showed us how to add captions to YouTube videos either by using the YouTube interface or the Amara website.  I’m personally partial to this topic and I’m happy to know that one of our students here in the lab is actually helping us prototype our first captioned videos … and if we get that small grant mmmm we may be able to do a bit more.  And speaking of accessibility and user friendly interfaces, for the MEM project, we’re also making some good progress, today was a good day for setting up the new theme … it looks like the next big challenge would be to implement a simple/accessible html toolbar in the submission form, potential plugins are listed on this page: 10 Best WYSIWYG Text and HTML Editors.

Last but not least, in mid march I had the pleasure to send some thank you notes to people, who helped me and played an important role in my first 5-6 years here at Miami.  In one of those emails, I came across DeEtta Jone’s updated website and I had a good time browsing the site and was reminded of the type of person and speaker that she is.  Finally, on April 1st I also managed to complete and submit my manuscript on IR platforms at US undergraduate institutions :-)

nos vemos!

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