Meetings, DSpace tweaking, and writing


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:

teamwork1Meetings: 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-logoDSpace 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.

grant-writingWritings: 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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