Elias Tzoc blog!

Without necessarily thinking about it, in January and in the last few days I’ve spent a good chunk of my time writing and writing and trying to meet certain deadlines.   Of course, most of us don’t like deadlines, although I think we all need deadlines because they can certainly help and keep us on track.  Somebody at EdTech put it this way “Deadlines can be both a blessing and a curse, deadlines force productivity, a timeline and a game plan that might otherwise go undefined.”  Anyway, part of my writings included a mid-year report for our NEH/FS project, an IMLS/Sparks proposal, a book chapter, and a couple of lines of PHP code -maybe I should have done more of this type of writing!

As for my new deadlines, we’re looking at March 30 for our FS 2.0 app beta test; I think Ann Elizabeth and I have managed to understand most of the new functionalities in the ARIS beta editor, the way it handles conversations is definitely 100% better than the previous version.  Perhaps my only complain so far, why cannot we duplicate our games?  Another set deadline is on April 27, when Marcus and I will give a talk at the 2015 Computers in Libraries Conference in Washington DC –my section will be on the ‘captioning pilot’ project we’re currently working on.  Other spring semester activities will include some on-going faculty projects, meetings and work on the MiamIdeas initiative, a couple of lectures for IMS201 on eBooks including one for Kate’s class, and some DSpace/WordPress/Omeka coding!

Lastly … sometimes I also wish there was a deadline for the PERM review process

Since the last hours of the first month of 2012 will come to an end shortly, I believe it’s ok to remind myself that “YES, time flies!” -especially when you get to enjoy unusual warm weather in January in southern Ohio.  Anyway, my examples of time, priorities, and deadline issues in the last couple of weeks include: replying to old emails saved in my “To-Do” folder; collecting quotes and support letters for a grant proposal; updating a couple of presentation proposals; and postponing this blog post

Some recent good news includes:
The acceptance of two poster proposals I co-authored for the upcoming 2nd JCLC Conference in September in Kansas City, MO.  “JCLC brings together a diverse group of librarians, library staff, library supporters, and community participants to explore issues of diversity in libraries and how they affect the ethnic communities who use our services.”  The poster titles are: Digital Diversity: Seven Examples from Miami University Libraries and Minnesota Institute Reflections: Three Personal Stories.

A couple of minor/recent changes in a DSpace theme for our Digital Collections … having the CSS and JavaScript files on our own machines have proven to be quite useful -at least for now.  This technique may also become useful for one of my tasks in the “DRC in a box” working group -a.k.a. the evaluation, test, and implementation of a collapse option for the elements in the ds-options DIV.  An example is available at http://digitalcollections.lib.muohio.edu.  So the trick is the addition to the following 10 lines … the idea behing this functionality is to help users browse a clean interface in a DSpace repository with many collections/communities.

$(document).ready(function() {
//collapse Search and My Account boxes
$(".ds-option-set:first").hide();
$(".ds-option-set:last").hide();
$(".ds-option-set-head").click(function()
{ $(this).next(".ds-option-set").slideToggle(500); });
//collapse 1st ds-simple-list -usually titled "All of xxxx"
$("div.ds-option-set ul.ds-simple-list:first").hide();
$(".ds-sublist-head").click(function()
{ $(this).next(".ds-simple-list").slideToggle(500); });
});

Getting an audio-text sync prototype to work using HTML5 also seems to open up some great opportunities and potential of use in digital collections/humanities.  I have to say that most of what I know and was able to do was thanks to the emails and conversations I had with Peter DuCharme and his HTML5 Audio Text Sync project.  I know this is where I get partial with our SPARKS proposal, but the transcript and multimedia sync has always been in my “to-do” list … I’m very positive that 2012 will be a good time for some basic work … or maybe for some “not-so-basic” implementations -especially if we get the grant

Last, and since I just updated my notes for my 4th annual review … it was good to reflect on the final outcome of a couple of intended -and a non-intended- collaborative work completed/initiated last year.  Now it’s time to get this post published and perhaps browse the just released issue of the Information Research Magazine

¡Feliz inicio de año!

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