Elias Tzoc blog!

On February 19th, I participated in the Amigos & CONTENTdm Online Conference.  As usual, it was a great opportunity to “virtually” meet, listen, and learn from other colleagues who are working on digital projects.

The day started with a talk by Claire Cocco titled “CONTENTdm End-User Experience Redesign: A User-centered design approach.“  I thought it was interesting to learn about some of the results of a usability study -using usabilla- they conducted last year.  For instance, the difference between end-users and librarians (CONTENTdm users) when displaying images and metadata.  The new “facet” feature will be an interesting one to follow in the near future.

For the concurrent sessions, I attended 3 of them: CONTENTdm and OAI-PMH: How to Optimize Content Discovery by Amy Jackson; Opening Pandora’s Box: Electronic Theses & Dissertations by Robin Leech; and Take This Code and Shove It - RSS/Facebook Integration by Dean Farrell and Jennifer Ricker.  A great advantage for participants at this online conference is that Amigos recorded all the sessions and participants can log-in -later- and watch sessions that they couldn’t attend.  I think that was great!

Last, I was also happy to share some of the web customization we’ve implemented here at Miami.  The title of my talk was “Helping Users Search/Browse/Share CONTENTdm collections” -in case someone is interested, the pages I used for my demos are: Re-Indexing CONTENTdm and Share-It: embedding CONTENTdm images.  Ok, that’s it for now.  A follow up on this topic will be part of a poster session this summer at the 2010 ALA Annual Conference -see you in DC!

Yes, after a great x-mas break with the familia and a some friends, now we’re back home and it’s the last week of 2009.  So before this week (year) wraps up, here I’m finishing up with a couple of proposals for 2010! …as well as advancing with an article draft which will be due in mid January.  Between the great food (tamales y chocolate) and these topics (Open Access, CONTENTdm, Diversity & LIS, Latin America & Technology) I plan to keep myself somewhat focused in the next 2 days!

Well, since writing is often a follow-up to some reading too, this afternoon I spent some time reading/thinking/reading the December issue of the Research Information Magazine. The main title on the cover can be a good source of inspiration for some new year’s resolution .  For me, a new programming skill will probably be Java -hello DSpace and/or IR+

Also, last week I had a very interesting conversation with an educator who talked about some of the future benefits of heavy text mining and machine translation for developing countries.  As many research studies have pointed out, one of the next goals of the global information society is “to reduce the information gap” …well, quick and efficient translation of abstracts may be a good start, and let’s not forget about the ongoing efforts towards Open Access in the developed world!  Will future generations be better off? …probably so, but in the meantime there is a lot do, see you in 2010!

As part of the “tips and tricks” session for the 2010 MidWest CONTENTdm User Groups Meeting, someone suggested that there should be an easy way for embedding images from CONTENTdm into blogs or websites.  Something like this will -definitely- facilitate the sharing of information and interaction between CONTENTdm users and the general public.

Anyway, a few lines of PHP and JavaScript code seem to give an alternative solution for this option, it’s not (completely) done yet, but this is how it should look like in a blog or website.

Alumni Library from the northeast ca. 1925

URL: http://digital.lib.muohio.edu/u?/snyder,2427

The code to be pasted includes 3 pieces of data: a) title of the image; b) an image of 350px linked directly from the CONTENTdm site; and c) of course a link back to the actual record using the persistent URL.  This method avoids saving a copy of an image before uploading it to a blog or website.  It provides a simple way to copy some HTML code and embed into an external site.

How it works?

• Find an image you like e.g. http://digital.lib.muohio.edu/u?/snyder,3437
• Click on the Share-It button
• Copy/Paste the HTML code and done!

…that’s it for now, …hopefully something like this will be useful for bloggers and the online community in general!

Today -September 30- is the official last day for this 5 months project!
It all started last year (2008) when Jacky Johnson and I learned about the OHC grant opportunity. The grant was awarded in April 2009, in May we reviewed some students’ applications and hired 2 students; the actual work started on June 1 – September 30!

The collection contains three types of materials: documents (about 765 PDFs), 68 images, and 27 videos (about 40 hours). Users can explore the website by browsing the collection (either by type or tagcloud) or by using the autosuggest search box on the homepage!  The slideshow on the main page uses SlideShowPro for Flash –which is a great application, fully customizable and easy to use.

Another addition to this collection is the “curriculum guide” page –here you can find lesson plans for elementary-middle-high-college levels.  This was part of workshop that Jacky thought this past summer.

It was a great experience -as usual with some challenges and unexpected surprises- however, we’re happy to see this project completed. In the next few days, we’ll doing a couple of presentations about this collection –e.g. one at the ASALH 2009 Annual Meeting in Cincinnati, OH and another one on Saturday October 10, at the Freedom Summer Conference at Miami University.

…hasta pronto!

Since I’ve officially moved to the Mac OS world -at least from 8-5;
the last few days have been quite interesting, learning/finding/exploring keyboard shortcuts and plug-ins.  And for one of the projects we’re working on, we need to populate a CONTENTdm collection with PDF files.  Well, in Windows most browsers will display a PDF file inline.  However, that’s not always the case on the Mac, maybe in Safari but not FireFox.

The good news is: there is a solution available at http://code.google.com/p/firefox-mac-pdf/
This plug-in uses PDFKit to display PDFs in FireFox on the Mac OS,
…now PDFs are displayed inside the browser!

…mmm, maybe it’s time to check/find a similar plug-in for browsers in Linux, we’ll see!

BTW: the http://www.opensourcemac.org/ is a great site for open-source software for the Mac OS X