Elias Tzoc blog!

In the first few days of January, I heard a couple of colleagues/friends saying: “2013 may be a better year” … and if staying busy is an indicator of “better”; then, I’d probably agree with that statement, although now we just need see what else can be done in the next 11 months.  And speaking of “what can be done” or maybe “what have been done” I cannot think of a better example that my 5th Year Annual Report, which I just submitted today and it’ll also serve as the first draft for my dossier for promotion due in June … some of the highlights in that report include some exciting/recent/upcoming projects:

• Omeka, we’re just days away to launch our first real faculty-driven project using Omeka.  It felt great to write some PHP code again, the first real tweak I had to work on was to write a script that reads the content of a folder with images and generate proper HTML code for a WOW Slider viewer.  This responsive jQuery image slider comes with some amazing visual effects.  J. Millard also wrote a script to pull book covers from OpenLibrary and I added some extra lines to embed videos from Vimeo.  As for the look-and-feel, it was mostly CSS and a couple of minor jQuery calls.  Perhaps my only complain with Omeka is that it doesn’t seem to support multiple themes on the same instance. Here is a preview!
  

• CONTENTdm, in November 2012, I started working on a set HTML & PHP templates for our new Digital Collections website.  Major customizations will include: dynamic splash pages for individual collections, scripts for embedding videos hosted at external sites and using HTML5 web standards, and a mobile-optimized interface using the jQuery Mobile Framework.  It’s absolutely great to seen the new image viewer in action … cannot wait to finalize this long-awaited upgrade.  Another exciting addition in this new version will be our Música Colonial collection, which will feature some multimedia files –thanks Jonathan Goodliffe.
• DSpace, we’re also planning to run our own DSpace 3.0 instance soon, which should also allow us to install/customize all -or many of- the features in this new release.  This change will also help me in adding/fixing some functions in my mobile theme.  BTW: This week, I got my first formal inquiry -from Venezuela- about this work … got me to use my Spanish skills again.
• Digital Humanities, as a follow up to the DH symposium we had last semester, next month we’ll start with a brown bag archived webinars series, Miami faculty, grad students and librarians are welcome … look forward to keeping the conversation and exploring the possibilities for some DH projects.  BTW: I’m also excited to be part of an NEH Digital Humanities grant proposal that a group of faculty is working on … which also reminds me to install/test ARIS in the very near future.

Ok, that’s it for today … time for a much needed break, next week will be a short week as I’m attending a two-days NEH/DH workshop in Columbus, and the week after I’ll be watching some of the Code4Lib talks –thanks for streaming it again.

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