Elias Tzoc blog!

This week was quite special for us … on Tuesday 4/23 our new facility was officially launched.  We had a good mix of faculty, administrators and librarians attending the event, the short program included remarks by Jerome Conley, Interim Dean & University Librarian, Bobby Gempesaw, University Provost, John Millard, Head of the CDS and demonstrations of existing projects -including three with faculty.

The latest project I presented was/is developing an ebook for an upcoming book “Digital Writing: Assessment & Evaluation” edited by Heidi A McKee and Danielle N DeVoss.  For this project, Jason Michel & I converted word files into HTML, created a basic CSS file and followed a set of steps for creating zip/epub files.  We also used Calibre to create a mobi file –which worked just fine on a Kindle app.  We look forward to completing this project later this summer.

Again, we’re now open and everyone is welcome to come/visit us … a working list of the type of services that the center offers is available on our website.

Earlier this month and as part of the idea of learning from others, I attended the Second Colloquium on Digital Scholarship at Case Western Reserve University.  The purpose and focus of the presentations were to highlight that producing and supporting digital scholarship is a necessarily collaborative process.  They had seven invited presentations from consultants, faculty, and librarians.  All sessions were video recorded and will be -soon- available on their website.  Overall, this program was a good opportunity to learn about the successes and challenges that others have dealt with when working on digital scholarship projects.   For us, the just announced Office of Research for Undergraduates may bring some new/exciting collaborative opportunities.

Last but not least, last week it was also good to learn that an article on Digital Diversity that I co-authored with Jacky Johnson will be published in a double issue of the Journal of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society.  Finally and on a different but related topic, the new book THE NEW DIGITAL AGE sounds like a ‘must’ reading for many of us

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Spring is finally here and -for me- it seems to be just a good time to catch up on some notes and updates about things that have happened in the last two months as well as things that will happen in April.  Undoubtedly, many of my/our activities are driven by the upcoming Open House for our new department -scheduled for April 23rd.  This week, I helped in creating an interactive map for the CDS’ website -which is (heavily) based on an excellent example created by the Research Commons at the University of Washington.  We look forward to completing all the details for this special date.

Two examples of the type of work the center can help clients with are: a) developing websites such as the Digital Literacy Partnership (DLP) project with Valerie Ubbes; and b) developing e-books for selected works available on Computers and Composition Digital Press with Heidi McKee –for this project, we’re working with our colleague Jason Michel.  The DLP project will be our first project using Omeka and it has allowed us to understand better the functionality -and some of the limitations- of this great open source online exhibit tool.  For instance, because of the type of DLP files (video and slideshow), we had to edit the show.php file and customize it accordingly.  Here is an outline of the changes we made:

<?php if (item('Dublin Core', 'Type') == 'Moving Image') { ?>
<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/<?php echo $VimeoID;?>"
 width="500" height="375" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen
 mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe>
<?php } else { // NOT a video, but a slideshow ?>
<!-- WOWSlider script -->
<?php $filename = item('Dublin Core', 'Identifier');
$dir = "/var/www/../viewer/" . $filename . "/";
if ($handle = opendir($dir)) {
$i = 0;
while (false !== ($entry = readdir($handle))) {
if ($entry != "." && $entry != "..") {
$all_files[] = $entry;
$i++; }}
closedir($handle); }
sort($all_files); // very important
$i=0;
foreach($all_files as $file) {
echo "<img src=\"/healthliteracy/viewer/$filename/$file\"
      alt=\"$file\" id=\"wowsl_$i\"/> \n";
$i++;
} ?>

Two other projects that I continue to work on are: CONTENTdm 6.x and DSpace 3.0.  In both cases, I’ve been quite pleased with the type of successful “tweaks” we’ve tested/implemented with pure jQuery & CSS code.  BTW: for those interested in hosted services, check out DSpaceDirect.

As for the next 2-3 weeks, some exciting things are also on the schedule: on Friday April 5, Kim Tully and I will be part of a panel at the 2012 SOA Conference and we’ll talk about the Civil War collection; on April 8-9, I’ll be at Case Western Reserve University attending their Second Colloquium on Digital Scholarship; on April 16, I’ll teach a class on HTML & CSS –which will serve as a first practice for my upcoming IMS 201 class in the fall; and of course, April 23 will “the day” for us in the center.

Last, my article on DSpace Mobile Interface was published this month … and thanks to a comment, now I know that for future tests I can also use The Responsinator site … now time to check the latest issue of Research Information.

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Those five words were quite popular in my to-do lists in November … first, they make up more than a third of the requirements for a new and exciting job description we’re working on; second, I spent some good time working on a couple of fixes for the DSpace mobile theme; third, I recently added a few jQuery lines to embed videos in DSpace; and finally, this week I sat down with a faculty for 1.5 hours prototyping a new website for one of her projects –in this session, we created three wireframes and today I actually worked on the first one, which obviously required some HTML & CSS editing –and some image tweaks in Photoshop as well.  Speaking of prototypes, wireframes, and web customization … two great video tutorials I recently saw in Lynda.com are: Creating an Effective Content Strategy for Your Website, where the author talks about how to think strategically about content in many formats (text, images, videos, animations, and infographics); and Interactive Data Visualization with Processing, where the author presents techniques on how to start communicating ideas and diagramming data in a more interactive way.

As for DSpace tweaks, we continue to add video content to our Scholarly Commons site; the current OhioLINK approach is to upload an mp4 file and a special flash theme streams the content in DSpace, this method works great on computers … however, on devices with no flash support (e.g. iPad) users simply cannot get to see the video.  In theory, a possible solution would be to use HTML5 video standards; in fact, I ran a couple of test using http://videojs.com but there seems to be a limitation -at least during my tests- with large videos (30+ minutes), sometimes it’ll take for ever to start playing … and because many of the videos on our site are over 30 minutes, I decided to go back to a video theme I created a year ago.  This video theme relies on videos hosted on Vimeo; the trick is to upload a copy of the video in Vimeo and add the vimeo URL in the metadata (e.g. dc.relation.isversionof: http://vimeo.com/17095108) … and with the following jQuery lines, “all” users will get the see/play the video; if the device/browser supports flash, it’ll play the regular mp4; if not, it’ll embed the vimeo file.  Examples include the videos in the Open Access Week collection.  BTW: the audio in one of the videos was “low/noisy” … so the workaround was: a) export an mp3 file from iMovie; b) use Audacity features (amplify and noise filters) to enhance the audio and export a new mp3 file; c) import the new mp3 in iMovie; and d) create an mp4 file using MPEG Streamclip.

  // detect non-flash support
  if (typeof navigator.plugins['Shockwave Flash'] !== 'undefined') {
  // if supported, then do nothing
  // alert('support');
     } else {
  // hide mp4 and embed vimeo file -if exists-
  // alert('no support');
  // check for number of links
  if (($("div#ds-body
     div#aspect_artifactbrowser_ItemViewer_div_item-view
     table.ds-includeSet-table a").length) > 2 ) {
  $("object").hide();
  // select vimeo file URL
  var htmlStr = $("div#ds-body
      div#aspect_artifactbrowser_ItemViewer_div_item-view
      table.ds-includeSet-table a:eq(1)").html();
  var htmlStr = htmlStr.replace('http://vimeo.com/', '');
  // replace mp4 code with vimeo iframe
  var htmlStr = $("object:first").replaceWith
      ("<iframe src='http://player.vimeo.com/video/" +
      htmlStr + "' width='500' height='375' </iframe>");
  } else {
  // no vimeo file for this record
  $("object").hide();
  }
  }

As for the VIDEOJS, we’re most likely going to use it for another project where the average run-time is 2-5 minutes … cannot wait to test something with the caption option!  Last but not least, two recent news: my article in Spanish on Open Access & Latin America is now officially online; and a late email exchange this afternoon confirmed that DSpace 3.0 has been officially released … I have to say that it’s absolutely great to see the “mobile theme” in this new release … saaaaalu’

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October was -again- a busy month … from meetings, reach-out activities, article reviews, digital humanities, open access, coding to ALAO.

As we continue to work towards the “goal” of the CDS to support faculty and students’ digital projects, this month I was part of a couple of new and interesting potential collaborations.  In mid October we met with a professor who is interested in implementing a digital and interactive component to a Freedom Summer project, we’re now looking at the ARIS platform and hopefully we can either re-use it or find something similar to it … one key feature of ARIS is its support for developing mobile games.  We also met with a group of students who are currently working on a “journal” project; our potential contribution would be with the technical infrastructure and for that, we’re most likely to use OJS, which continues to be the most popular system for peer-review and open-access journals.  A third meeting took place thanks to a contact made by one of our library liaisons; in this case, a history grad student is interested in adding a “map” layer to create some data visualization for a collection from the 16th century … an example in mind is the Mapping the Republic of Letters.

Also, there is no doubt that the Sixth Annual Open Access Week was a big highlight for this month.  For us, the first of two MUL events during OA week was the Digital Humanities Symposium; the event was an opportunity for faculty, grad students and librarians to listen to two outside and five local speakers … as well as to talk about what DH could mean for them/us.  The second event was a talk How Open Scholarship is Changing Research, which was organized by the Library’s Scholarly Communication working group.  Moreover and for the second year, online visitors found a pop-up image on the library’s homepage with a message “What if you had no access to the library?” … will this help create an awareness about the ongoing problem of journal cost? mmm who knows, although for many, the Harvard’s statement about “not being able” to keep up with all the subscription costs may also help others understand the problem.

As for my tech/learning activities, this month was a good time to start learning a bit more about Git.  Because of my mobile theme contribution to DSpace 3.0, I finally understand (better) the benefits of a version control software; although at first, Git can be quite overwhelming or confusing.  A good tutorial I found is Git Essential Training by Kevin Skoglund. There is definitely more to learn, but so far, my list of 10+ GIT commands are keeping me busy!

Last, on Friday Oct. 26 I was again at the 38th ALAO Annual Conference.  Our CW team had a poster session -which was about the work we did for the CW Symposium and the ALA/NEH book-discussion series.

I was also part of talk Skate to Where the Puck is Going to Be, where we presented an overview of the CDS … the outline included: Setting the stage, Designing the space, Reaching our clients, Tech tools, and Services.

Ok, that’s it for now … now back to some GIT experiments as well as finish up with a draft for D-Lib Magazine

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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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