Elias Tzoc blog!

In the first few days of January, I heard a couple of colleagues/friends saying: “2013 may be a better year” … and if staying busy is an indicator of “better”; then, I’d probably agree with that statement, although now we just need see what else can be done in the next 11 months.  And speaking of “what can be done” or maybe “what have been done” I cannot think of a better example that my 5th Year Annual Report, which I just submitted today and it’ll also serve as the first draft for my dossier for promotion due in June … some of the highlights in that report include some exciting/recent/upcoming projects:

• Omeka, we’re just days away to launch our first real faculty-driven project using Omeka.  It felt great to write some PHP code again, the first real tweak I had to work on was to write a script that reads the content of a folder with images and generate proper HTML code for a WOW Slider viewer.  This responsive jQuery image slider comes with some amazing visual effects.  J. Millard also wrote a script to pull book covers from OpenLibrary and I added some extra lines to embed videos from Vimeo.  As for the look-and-feel, it was mostly CSS and a couple of minor jQuery calls.  Perhaps my only complain with Omeka is that it doesn’t seem to support multiple themes on the same instance. Here is a preview!
  

• CONTENTdm, in November 2012, I started working on a set HTML & PHP templates for our new Digital Collections website.  Major customizations will include: dynamic splash pages for individual collections, scripts for embedding videos hosted at external sites and using HTML5 web standards, and a mobile-optimized interface using the jQuery Mobile Framework.  It’s absolutely great to seen the new image viewer in action … cannot wait to finalize this long-awaited upgrade.  Another exciting addition in this new version will be our Música Colonial collection, which will feature some multimedia files –thanks Jonathan Goodliffe.
• DSpace, we’re also planning to run our own DSpace 3.0 instance soon, which should also allow us to install/customize all -or many of- the features in this new release.  This change will also help me in adding/fixing some functions in my mobile theme.  BTW: This week, I got my first formal inquiry -from Venezuela- about this work … got me to use my Spanish skills again.
• Digital Humanities, as a follow up to the DH symposium we had last semester, next month we’ll start with a brown bag archived webinars series, Miami faculty, grad students and librarians are welcome … look forward to keeping the conversation and exploring the possibilities for some DH projects.  BTW: I’m also excited to be part of an NEH Digital Humanities grant proposal that a group of faculty is working on … which also reminds me to install/test ARIS in the very near future.

Ok, that’s it for today … time for a much needed break, next week will be a short week as I’m attending a two-days NEH/DH workshop in Columbus, and the week after I’ll be watching some of the Code4Lib talks –thanks for streaming it again.

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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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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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This Saturday, June 26th, I’ll be joining the first group of poster-session presenters at the 2010 ALA Annual Conference. I plan to talk/demonstrate the overall workflow for re-indexing metadata (from CONTENTdm) to generate external features for digital collection’s websites. Additionally, I’ll be ready to show others how to use the web-forms I’ve created to help them create their own search/browse/share features; I understand this work is somehow limited to CONTENTdm users, but with a little bit of tweak any of the scripts can be adapted to another Digital Management System.

Below is a small version of my actual poster, it’s a huge file (82X34 inches); it does seem a little too big for something like this -but who knows- I’ll wait and see how things go, I hope to get some interesting questions and feedback.

There is definitely a lot going on there this weekend, so I look forward to attending some other (interesting) sessions -especially those with a focus on: digital libraries/collections, open source technology, scholarly communication, digital repositories, libraries in latin america, diversity, new leadership, etc.  Last but not least, since this is just my second time at an ALA Annual, I found this page “ALA Conference Survival Tips” quite useful :)  …and of course I also plan to get a live update from South Africa -especially on Saturday & Sunday at 2:30pm.

Saludos!

For the third year, I recently attended the 5th MidWest CONTENTdm Users Group Meeting and it was a great opportunity to visit The University of Iowa and to meet the rest of the planning committee.  Being part of the program sub-committee gave me a good understanding -and an opportunity to be part- of some of the activities required to organize a regional gathering.

The keynote speaker was Kenning Arlitsch -Associate Director for IT Services at the University of Utah’s Marriott Library.  Although the focus of his talk was on the results of a survey designed to discern the perceptions and preferences of future library leaders related to organizational cultures in academic libraries; he also underlined the importance (need) for librarians to acquire more technical skills in order to keep up with constant changes in users’ expectations.

I also found two other sessions quite interesting: a) The Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI), perhaps this is another good example of a shared CONTENTdm installation serving multiple institutions and therefore sharing costs; and b) Customization, Web Services, and Storage at Ball State, this was a more technical session focused on authentication methods for viewing protected records and an off-line backup system; both topics seem to be relevant especially as libraries continue to digitize collections with some copyright restrictions.

On the second day, I was part of a panel “Collaboration & Partnership for Building Digital Collections.” Robin Crumrin and Connie Renfeld shared their experience in building the Indiana Memory project -a multi-institutional collaboration at the State level.  And with the help of Jacky Johnson, I talked about the Freedom Summer Project as an example of a multi-departmental project here at Miami.  A copy of our presentation is available here.

Last but not least, I heard it again; a major release with a new web-template option will happen this year, …look forward to checking that out!