Elias Tzoc blog!

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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We all must have heard the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words” … and many of us will probably agree -at least to some extent- with the meaning of this popular phrase.  In fact, I recently used it to justify my reasoning in creating a wireframe to explain several ideas I wanted to share in a single page.  But today, for the sake of fun and under the assumption that a picture is the same as an image, I asked myself a nice/tricky question: “is a GIF animated image worth more than a thousand words? … mmmm probably so

Anyway, back to the title of this post, in today’s multimedia world, moving images or video clips can be very effective ways to communicate an idea, especially for concepts that require some sort of animation.  For instance, the image below is a screenshot of a five minutes video and overview of the content of the article Multi-Cellular Rosettes in the Mouse Visceral Endoderm Facilitate the Ordered Migration of Anterior Visceral Endoderm Cells -the cell transformation process is something that can only be represented in a video … so, is 5 min enough?

Although providing video abstracts to academic publications isn’t as popular -yet- … the recent Emerald’s Video Abstracts Showcase is another example of the potential benefit/use of this new addition to the traditional text format of publications.  In the words of Emerald “Short videos presented by the originator of an article can provide an engaging platform for presenting a broad overview of the content and motivation behind a piece of work.”

Creating -even- video abstracts can be time-consuming, but how about converting text to audio files -perhaps using semi-automated tools.  With all the development in text-to-speech technologies, this seems to be a feasible feature in the near future.  A good example of articles with audio files is the work by the OMICS Publishing Group, where most journals provide access to their publications in multiple formats such as: PDF, HTML, XML, MP3, and others.

In conclusion, audio files can increase accessibility to academic publications -e.g. people with visual impairments could listen to the content.  Ok, now it’s time for me to go back and watch another video tutorial on jQuery … I guess I’m now just “partial” to videos

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Since the last hours of the first month of 2012 will come to an end shortly, I believe it’s ok to remind myself that “YES, time flies!” -especially when you get to enjoy unusual warm weather in January in southern Ohio.  Anyway, my examples of time, priorities, and deadline issues in the last couple of weeks include: replying to old emails saved in my “To-Do” folder; collecting quotes and support letters for a grant proposal; updating a couple of presentation proposals; and postponing this blog post

Some recent good news includes:
The acceptance of two poster proposals I co-authored for the upcoming 2nd JCLC Conference in September in Kansas City, MO.  “JCLC brings together a diverse group of librarians, library staff, library supporters, and community participants to explore issues of diversity in libraries and how they affect the ethnic communities who use our services.”  The poster titles are: Digital Diversity: Seven Examples from Miami University Libraries and Minnesota Institute Reflections: Three Personal Stories.

A couple of minor/recent changes in a DSpace theme for our Digital Collections … having the CSS and JavaScript files on our own machines have proven to be quite useful -at least for now.  This technique may also become useful for one of my tasks in the “DRC in a box” working group -a.k.a. the evaluation, test, and implementation of a collapse option for the elements in the ds-options DIV.  An example is available at http://digitalcollections.lib.muohio.edu.  So the trick is the addition to the following 10 lines … the idea behing this functionality is to help users browse a clean interface in a DSpace repository with many collections/communities.

$(document).ready(function() {
//collapse Search and My Account boxes
$(".ds-option-set:first").hide();
$(".ds-option-set:last").hide();
$(".ds-option-set-head").click(function()
{ $(this).next(".ds-option-set").slideToggle(500); });
//collapse 1st ds-simple-list -usually titled "All of xxxx"
$("div.ds-option-set ul.ds-simple-list:first").hide();
$(".ds-sublist-head").click(function()
{ $(this).next(".ds-simple-list").slideToggle(500); });
});

Getting an audio-text sync prototype to work using HTML5 also seems to open up some great opportunities and potential of use in digital collections/humanities.  I have to say that most of what I know and was able to do was thanks to the emails and conversations I had with Peter DuCharme and his HTML5 Audio Text Sync project.  I know this is where I get partial with our SPARKS proposal, but the transcript and multimedia sync has always been in my “to-do” list … I’m very positive that 2012 will be a good time for some basic work … or maybe for some “not-so-basic” implementations -especially if we get the grant

Last, and since I just updated my notes for my 4th annual review … it was good to reflect on the final outcome of a couple of intended -and a non-intended- collaborative work completed/initiated last year.  Now it’s time to get this post published and perhaps browse the just released issue of the Information Research Magazine

¡Feliz inicio de año!

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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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Yesterday was the last day of this year’s Open Access (OA) Week.  A very nice “summary” of the history of OA by Tom Olijhoek is available on the http://www.openaccessweek.org site.  As a five years old initiative, I think it was great to hear about the number of activities -from conferences, workshops to twitter entries- that took place in hundreds of institutions from dozens of countries in the past seven days … perhaps one of the most significant (related) events is the upcoming 9th Berlin Open Access conference –to be held for the first time in America.

This year the Scholarly Communication working group at Miami also held an active awareness campaign which highlighted a pop-up image on the library’s homepage with the traditional OA Lock and the message “What if you had no access to the library?” Other activities included five blog posts on OA on the library’s News & Notes section, as well was the distribution of flyers on campus with links to the Scholarly Commons and the Scholars at Miami sites.

A quick look at the Directory of Open Access Journals, it appears that the top 20 countries remain to be almost the same as to what it was last year.  A couple of interesting changes include: Egypt was one of the only three countries that added/registered more than 100 journals in 2011; Iran is now in slot # 17 with a total of 113 journals; and (too bad) now there are only 5 Spanish speaking countries in the top list.

http://www.doaj.org/

Last but not least, as part of an upcoming “project” … in the last couple of weeks, I’ve reading some tutorials about Open Journal Systems  -which seems to be one of the most popular options out there –especially for “peer-reviewed” journals.  But just as I finish with this post, a new alternative has been published in the Code4Lib Journal Open Access Publishing with Drupal … anyway, I guess different choices for different needs

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