Elias Tzoc blog!

Yes, this is my last post on this blog … I’ll continue to blog about some of my work/interests and those will be on the Center for Digital Scholarship website … see you there!

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This week was quite special for us … on Tuesday 4/23 our new facility was officially launched.  We had a good mix of faculty, administrators and librarians attending the event, the short program included remarks by Jerome Conley, Interim Dean & University Librarian, Bobby Gempesaw, University Provost, John Millard, Head of the CDS and demonstrations of existing projects -including three with faculty.

The latest project I presented was/is developing an ebook for an upcoming book “Digital Writing: Assessment & Evaluation” edited by Heidi A McKee and Danielle N DeVoss.  For this project, Jason Michel & I converted word files into HTML, created a basic CSS file and followed a set of steps for creating zip/epub files.  We also used Calibre to create a mobi file –which worked just fine on a Kindle app.  We look forward to completing this project later this summer.

Again, we’re now open and everyone is welcome to come/visit us … a working list of the type of services that the center offers is available on our website.

Earlier this month and as part of the idea of learning from others, I attended the Second Colloquium on Digital Scholarship at Case Western Reserve University.  The purpose and focus of the presentations were to highlight that producing and supporting digital scholarship is a necessarily collaborative process.  They had seven invited presentations from consultants, faculty, and librarians.  All sessions were video recorded and will be -soon- available on their website.  Overall, this program was a good opportunity to learn about the successes and challenges that others have dealt with when working on digital scholarship projects.   For us, the just announced Office of Research for Undergraduates may bring some new/exciting collaborative opportunities.

Last but not least, last week it was also good to learn that an article on Digital Diversity that I co-authored with Jacky Johnson will be published in a double issue of the Journal of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society.  Finally and on a different but related topic, the new book THE NEW DIGITAL AGE sounds like a ‘must’ reading for many of us

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Spring is finally here and -for me- it seems to be just a good time to catch up on some notes and updates about things that have happened in the last two months as well as things that will happen in April.  Undoubtedly, many of my/our activities are driven by the upcoming Open House for our new department -scheduled for April 23rd.  This week, I helped in creating an interactive map for the CDS’ website -which is (heavily) based on an excellent example created by the Research Commons at the University of Washington.  We look forward to completing all the details for this special date.

Two examples of the type of work the center can help clients with are: a) developing websites such as the Digital Literacy Partnership (DLP) project with Valerie Ubbes; and b) developing e-books for selected works available on Computers and Composition Digital Press with Heidi McKee –for this project, we’re working with our colleague Jason Michel.  The DLP project will be our first project using Omeka and it has allowed us to understand better the functionality -and some of the limitations- of this great open source online exhibit tool.  For instance, because of the type of DLP files (video and slideshow), we had to edit the show.php file and customize it accordingly.  Here is an outline of the changes we made:

<?php if (item('Dublin Core', 'Type') == 'Moving Image') { ?>
<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/<?php echo $VimeoID;?>"
 width="500" height="375" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen
 mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe>
<?php } else { // NOT a video, but a slideshow ?>
<!-- WOWSlider script -->
<?php $filename = item('Dublin Core', 'Identifier');
$dir = "/var/www/../viewer/" . $filename . "/";
if ($handle = opendir($dir)) {
$i = 0;
while (false !== ($entry = readdir($handle))) {
if ($entry != "." && $entry != "..") {
$all_files[] = $entry;
$i++; }}
closedir($handle); }
sort($all_files); // very important
$i=0;
foreach($all_files as $file) {
echo "<img src=\"/healthliteracy/viewer/$filename/$file\"
      alt=\"$file\" id=\"wowsl_$i\"/> \n";
$i++;
} ?>

Two other projects that I continue to work on are: CONTENTdm 6.x and DSpace 3.0.  In both cases, I’ve been quite pleased with the type of successful “tweaks” we’ve tested/implemented with pure jQuery & CSS code.  BTW: for those interested in hosted services, check out DSpaceDirect.

As for the next 2-3 weeks, some exciting things are also on the schedule: on Friday April 5, Kim Tully and I will be part of a panel at the 2012 SOA Conference and we’ll talk about the Civil War collection; on April 8-9, I’ll be at Case Western Reserve University attending their Second Colloquium on Digital Scholarship; on April 16, I’ll teach a class on HTML & CSS –which will serve as a first practice for my upcoming IMS 201 class in the fall; and of course, April 23 will “the day” for us in the center.

Last, my article on DSpace Mobile Interface was published this month … and thanks to a comment, now I know that for future tests I can also use The Responsinator site … now time to check the latest issue of Research Information.

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