Past & Upcoming activities


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 :-)

Scholarly CommonsA 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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