Elias Tzoc blog!

This is the last official week at work in 2011 … and I’m still trying to figure out what else I can accomplish this week -if any- as well as checking/updating my notes for some interesting activities that either kept me busy in the last few weeks or will keep my busy once I get back in January.  Here is a quick review:

Meetings: this semester I was part of a search committee … so in late November and early December we had four candidates on campus; on-site interviews are always fascinating, especially for those key and unexpected (follow-up) questions that often come up from either candidates or the audience.  In November and on behalf of ALFAS, I co-chaired the 4th Social Justice Read-In -which was part of the Eighth Annual Human Rights and Social Justice Program- this one-hour event was a great success -thanks to some great collaborative work with students, faculty, and staff.

DSpace tweaking: this work definitely remains as one of my favorite activities … even though it often involves some moments of “coding-confusion” especially when it comes down to jQuery and/or XSLT –not to mention some failed Java attempts.  Anyway, in early December we were once again (chosen) to be the test institution for deploying the new IIP Viewer on our production instance at the DRC, that was how we got our two Civil War collections up and running with the new viewer.  In the last week of classes, we also received a request to put online a 2007 lecture sponsored by the Center for American and World Cultures (CAWC), this request was a good reminder that we needed to enable a video player in Scholarly Commons … so after a couple of days of testing, we now have three video collections on this site: CAWC’s lectures, Dalai Lama visit, and the recent Civil War Symposium.

Writings: this month I’ve been working on the final draft of a manuscript on Open Access & Latin America -en Español … it’s almost there and I do plan to finish/submit it soon.  And because Spanish seems to gain some interest in what I do, this week I’m also drafting an outline for a possible grant proposal that will aim to develop a Spanish Language Learning Resource –ya veremos!  Another exciting writing activity is a SPARKS grant proposal that a colleague and I are currently working on –which will involve a couple of very interesting ideas such as: an automated audio file creation based on text and a synchronized audio and text using HTML5.

Last but not least, this day has been GREAT so far … this morning I was part of a very successful meeting (I think), which will most likely translate into a new project in 2012; I also got a package from Emerald with 5 copies of an article we recently published; and this afternoon I got an iPad2 –which will become my motivation for re-taking an existing prototype for presenting non-born-digital files on mobile/tablet devices, and maybe the development of a basic iOS application for library digital collections … we’ll see, but for now that’s it FELICIDADES Y NOS VEMOS EN EL 2012!

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This year, as part of the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War, the Miami University Libraries are creating digital collections of important Civil War (CW) materials currently housed in the Walter Havinghurst Special Collections. So far, two collections are under development: Civil War Diaries Collection and Samuel Richey Collection of the Southern Confederacy. In terms of providing online access to these digitized manuscripts or to any non-born-digital file … despite the current technologies (e.g. Djatoka Image Server, IIP Image Server, DjVu Libre, XTF, or the IA BookReader), there seems to room for changes in order to provide a enhanced user experience for digitized multi-page items.

So back to our CW collections, since we’re loading the data into a DSpace repository -hosted at OhioLINK- we’ve been “testing” a couple of options for the image viewer. The ultimate goal will be to use the new IIP Viewer currently on “test” mode.

The viewer -will- feature a toolbar with options for zooming, panning, rotating and viewing images in full screen mode; the viewer also includes a navigation box with thumbnails helps in browsing multi-page files. But since this is not ready -yet- for a DSpace production instance, a plan B has been to re-use a DjVu/JPG viewer that has worked well for us in the past. It may not be as catchy as the IIP viewer, but it features a basic toolbar with zoom and page navigation options … and perhaps the big plus is that because it uses regular JPG files for display, it works great on any device and/or browser -which is not true for the flash-based IIP viewer.

Anyway, either viewer will -soon- allow us to provide access to large, high-resolution, and multi-page objects in these two Civil War collections. A first formal presentation is scheduled for October 22nd at the Symposium “The American Civil War: Why It Still Matters” in King Library Room 320. The symposium is officially the kick-off for a grant-funded reading and discussion series “Let’s Talk About It: Making Sense of the American Civil War” sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Library Association, and the Miami University Humanities Center. More information about this program is available at: http://libguides.lib.muohio.edu/civilwar

Ok, that’s it for today … now back to an outdated -but sill needed- DSpace document on XMLUI tips & tricks … as well as to complete the copyright assignment form for an article I co-authored on “Technical Skills for New Digital Librarians” scheduled for publication next month in Library Hi Tech News.

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Last week, I was back in Austin for about two days.  I know that doesn’t sound enough for a place where I actually lived for more than two years …anyway, on Wednesday, June 8, I attended the first day of the Sixth Annual International Conference on Open Repositories.  It was great to join a group of 300+ technologists/advocates/developers of digital repositories from 20 countries and 30 states.

The first full session I attended was on Cloud Solutions.  The first speaker was Peter Nuernberg from the Texas Digital Library and he talked about the work they have done in storing data on cloud machines.  I think it was interesting to hear that regardless of some of the recent issues with Amazon, he commented on how the cloud option has changed from a backup to a primary alternative for some of their projects.  For DSpace test-instances at OhioLINK, I know Amazon EC2 was a successful experiment!  The second half was a panel on the DuraCloud Pilot Program led by Michele Kimpton; two cases were presented (MIT Libraries & Northwestern) and the speakers shared their experiences in using the service for preservation and access services.  It was good to learn about features like Image Transforming, Video/Audio Streaming, and Image Serving.  These features are definitely similar to what some of us are “prototyping” and wanting to have as a default option in DSpace … so maybe we’re not alone in our journey/confusion in using a software for something that it wasn’t designed for

In the afternoon, I attended one of the new 24X7 sessions, where each presenter had a maximum of 24 slides and 7 minutes to present.  My favorites were: a) Linked Data: The Future for Open Repositories?, Adrian talked about the importance of putting archival and bibliographic data in a Linked Data format for the benefit of education and research –he also talked a bit about the LOCAH project and how it supports goals such as exposing (semantic) data and enabling new visualization of data; b) Value and Impact Metrics for Open Repositories, the presenter talked about OpenSky and its ability to generate custom (annual) reports as well as staff help for populating online CVs or departmental/personal web pages –such services are definitely appreciated by IR users; and c) Don’t Bold the Field Name!, Simeon talked about the need for presenting “relevant” data in a meaningful way for end-users (consumers) … it seems like regular usability tests can be part of this custom data presentation work, but how often?

In the last session, I was part of a group of 30+ poster presenters,

…each had a one-minute for a quick elevator speech -too bad I couldn’t sing, but I think I said what I needed to say in 55 seconds … anyway, I really enjoyed talking to about 11poster visitors, I understand I’m biased to my topic “file viewers for DSpace” but I was glad to learn that at least three other institutions are working on similar work for their DSpace repositories.  Will we see an out-of-the-box viewer in DSpace for non-born-digital objects?, I definitely hope so.

Finally, for social and non-conference chats, it was absolutely great to talk to Kent, Yolanda, and Jee … next time, WE will definitely plan for more time to spend in Austin.

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I know I was late and therefore I couldn’t join the group this afternoon, when I tried to login I got a message “Error: you cannot attend the meeting because its capacity has been reached.”

Anyway, in case anyone is interested on the topic of File Viewers for DSpace Collections, here is a link to a PDF file with a basic outline of the talk; also, key points of what I was going to talk about include:

Why viewers for DSpace?
DSpace is quite popular in the academic world, many institutions are using it now for a variety of objects –e.g. manuscripts, maps, books, videos, etc.  In January 2011, there was a discussion on this topic in the DSpace tech listserv; several people jumped in and talked about the need/importance of an out-of-the-box solution for DSpace.

How others are doing it?
- Texas A&M -the developers of the XMLUI framework- for a folio collection, they’re using thumbnails as links to individual pages, the page images are then displayed on a pop-up window using some Lightbox script.
- Another solution is provided by @mire –a commercial organization that develops modules for DSpace.  Their Document Streaming Module enables in-browser viewing of document files and it based on the Scribd’s iPaper document viewer.
- There is also a test/prototype using PDFs and the Google Docs Viewer.

Local evaluation of alternatives (workarounds)
- In the summer of 2010 we implemented a flash-based viewer that reads jp2 files and feeds a dynamic viewer based on OpenZoom -a front end of the IIPImage server; the viewer includes zoom and full-screen options and it seems to work great for newspaper or magazine files.
- More recently, we tested an existing PHP script that can take a DjVu file and creates JPG files for each page; in the same script, we customized a basic toolbar that can help users navigate from page to page or use a drop-down menu to jump to any page.
In both cases, we’re using some PHP scripts to generate the preview files and then using an identifier to embed them into DSpace.

What’s next?
Obviously, the desired goal in implementing a file/document viewer in DSpace is to optimize the interaction between a DSpace record page and users.  With the current default option, there is no preview and if users need to view a page or some pages in a multi-page file, they would need to manually download the file … and for a file with 100+ pages and/or 50+ MB, this can be an issue.  So I think the hope is that someday with the help of others, we can have an Out-Of-The-Box Document Viewer for DSpace, which ideally can include features like: zooming, searching, options for exporting to other formats, as well as something that can work on any device -regardless of their screen size, OS or browser.

Oh well, that’s it for now … feliz fin de semana! 

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As more institutions continue to work with large and diverse type of content for their digital repositories, there is definitely a “new” need to evaluate, prototype and implement file viewers to adequately display files from non-text collections.

When displaying a record in DSpace -by default- users will only see the metadata and a box with basic description of the file/s associated with the record.  This method may be fine IR projects where most files are in PDF format; however, for non-text collections users will most likely expect to get a “snapshot” of the file/s in the record.  Displaying something on the first page of a record becomes particularly important for unique and/or complex files such as: maps, manuscripts, books, or multimedia.  For these types of files, there is usually a need for features like: zooming, magnifying, searching, streaming, etc.

Then, the question/challenge is: how to implement viewers using the DSpace files that can be embedded on the record’s page along with the metadata?  For image collections, there seems to be a good number of examples –including many using some combination of Lightbox script.  An afternoon test for multi-page documents using a DjVu file seems to produce some decent results.  The trick is to create a set of JPG files for every page -using a local PHP script based on DjVuLibre- and embedded it in the item_view element.  This option (prototype) would allow users to view pages sequentially or jump to any page of the document and of course they will have the option to download a PDF version of the file if they need to.  In short, this workaround seems to work fine as an early prototype, an OCR feature will make it perfect.

Below is a screenshot of today’s test:

In since the output file is a JPG, it works perfectly fine on the iPads and probably most other tablets as well.

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