Elias Tzoc blog!

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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