Elias Tzoc blog!

In early 2012, as I was finishing up with my annual report -and in consultation with my supervisor- I decided to add a “mobile theme for DSpace” to my summer to-do list …  why a mobile interface for DSpace? well, I kind of had three reasons/justifications for this: a) I wanted to learn a bit more of the jQuery Mobile framework; b) we wanted to have a mobile interface for our Scholarly Commons project; and c) there was no mobile theme for DSpace -at least not back then.

The real “adventure” started in late May when I sent a message to the DSpace-tech listserv, the replies confirmed that a JIRA ticket for this topic was created back in September 2011 … I also got some good ideas about the actual implementation of a mobile theme.  The next step included some “basic” planning which included two key activities: a) creating a wireframe for the mobile interface; and b) researching for some mobile “best practices” out there.   For the wireframe design, I tried to stick to some basic rules such as “data entry on mobile devices should be minimized” or “keep it simple and clean” … so because of those rules, I took the liberty to make some decisions/assumptions.  For instance, the DSpace mobile interface will be for regular DSpace users; therefore, it was ok to remove the entire ds-options sidebar, which usually contains all of the “administrative” functions.  For the research activity, it was absolutely useful to spend part of a Friday afternoon watching the Mobile Web Design & Development Fundamentals tutorial by Joe Marini.

In mid July, I had a mobile theme running on a second copy of the XMLUI webapp in a DSpace 1.6 installation -now, I know that this is probably NOT the best way to do this- but back then this was the only way I got it to work and it allowed me to continue to test/tweak some CSS, XML, XSL, and JS files.  One of the most special -but also trouble and confusing- days was when I installed a couple of device emulators.  The Opera Mobile Emulator & the Android SDK were very useful in testing and adjusting the site to small screen sizes (even 320×240); the iOS Simulator worked just fine; but the real headache was with the Windows Phone Emulator because it simply didn’t work … after a good time researching about the “not loading” error, I learned that it was an HTML element without a closing tag

In early August, a colleague and I run some last tests and we believed it was time to share the link with others and start collecting some feedback … at the same time, we wanted to test the new theme on an OhioLINK test machine.  I soon learned that duplicating the XMLUI webapp was neither effective nor sustainable -especially in a shared infrastructure.  This is where two developers at OhioLINK came up with a solution -using a second domain name- that works great and looks robust.

And today, we’re pleased to actually see it up and running on a production machine.  So if you’re curious about it, please visit http://sc.lib.muohio.edu/ and if your device isn’t detected as mobile, try this URL http://mobile.sc.lib.muohio.edu/.  As with anything “new” … there is definitely room for improvement and we’ll welcome comments and feedback

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Two summer activities are keeping me well entertained … so whether it’s learning and testing out a new trick for the DSpace mobile theme or discovering the excellent transcription work being done for our own Música Colonial digital archive … the last few weeks have been quite interesting

The mobile DSpace theme is already in progress -almost there, the image on the right is an example of a quite complex page now with a clean and fluid look and feel.  The real test is available at our own DSpace test instance.   jQuery Mobile provided a key start for this work and the magic of its ThemeRoller generator is an excellent reason to stick to this option as much as possible.  Anyone who’s done some theme customization in DSpace knows how hard it’s to find and control the appearance of certain elements –e.g. div.pagination or form.ds-interactive-div.  A major challenge I’ve found so far is adding HTML5 attributes to elements that are dynamically generated and that are context sensitive (e.g. collection list or view).  For a couple of days, I thought using the .html() property to modify the HTML on the fly was the perfect fix; however, this type of tweaks in jQM requires a manual page refresh … so apparently a good plan B will be to go back and rely on some old CSS tweaks, so far, popular and key examples include:

display: none; //hide some extra DSpace elements
-moz-border-radius: 5px; //simulate jQM corners
border-radius: 5px;
min-width: 390px; //control width for some sub-header DIVs
max-height: 90px;

… and speaking of jQuery tweaks, last week we found a bug in our code for controlling the display of videos and images in Scholarly Commons, the lines below were part of the magic.  An examples is here.

// if more than 1 video is found, only embed the 1st one,
// except for objects within the "imageviewer-wrapper" DIV
if(v>=2) {
$("object").hide();
$("object:first").show();
$("object", "#imageviewer-wrapper").show();
}
else {
$("object").show();
}

As for the Música Colonial project, in June I “discovered” an entry about this project on the Choral Public Domain Library (CPDL) … and perhaps the most interesting discovery was the 20+ pieces of work already transcribed with PDFs and MIDIs by Jonathan Goodliffe –an excellent and recent example is “A la reina del socorro”; We’ll definitely include links to the corresponding items in our upcoming website for this project.  In the meantime, thanks Jonathan for all the work you’re doing and YES “the online collaboration was at the very heart of the original idea of this project” and with this type of help, someday we may be able to transcribe the entire 800+ items in the collection.

… hasta la próxima!

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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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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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