Elias Tzoc blog!

At the beginning of this semester, I told a couple of people that I might not survive the first half … and the main two reasons for that early thought were two projects that required some special/unknown tests/research/coding … trying to come up with a realistic deadline when the learning curve is kind of uncertain is a bit of a challenge.  However, here we’re already fully emerged into the second half and I’m pretty sure the next 5-6 weeks will go just fine!

First of all, the Freedom Summer Game was probably my top priority in September and even though we saw all the new features in ARIS 2.0 … because of the amount of work we had in the “old” editor, it was clear that we were better off in sticking to the older version and in the end, it allowed us to develop a good understanding of how the “characters scripts” work … or how to add some HTML code for text formatting.  Anyway, this first version of the project seems to be almost done, we’ve collected some good feedback including a new/short “storyboard” version by David Gagnon, the ARIS inventor.  On my end, some of the lessons learned include: WiFi can be very tricky, therefore devices with no GPS should be excluded; eliminating extra text/buttons on the screen is a MUST; the lack of a “back” button seems to a shared/common concern among playtesters  … perhaps the good news is that some of these issues will be fixed in ARIS 2.0 … which is another reason we want to migrate to that new version -as soon as we can.  During the conference, we kind of made it official that we’ll be working on a version 2 and it should be released sometime in the spring semester … so stay tune!

In early September, we also learned that there was an opportunity to demo the Middle East Media project at an international conference in Qatar … well, something like this was definitely a good reason/excuse to finalize the “beta” version of this site.  One of the major changes was modifying the header.php file as we added a few PHP lines to check if the page being displayed is one of the new “custom taxonomy” pages or not.  Overall, this project has allowed us to test some of the functionalities that WordPress and its plugins can offer to this type of scholarly websites.

Last, we finally have some good news for the Miami Video Captioning PILOT project, this week we’re getting ready to hire 2-3 students who will be helping us transcribe selected videos.   We’re still hoping to launch a site for this pilot project sometime around the 2015 Access For ALL Symposium.  Finally, with all the TO-DOs I had for the first half of October, it was easy to completely forget about an IFLA book chapter proposal … however, the editors were kind enough to extend the deadline for a week and now my proposal is in review

Esto es todo por ahora, hasta la próxima!

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For the third year, I recently attended the 5th MidWest CONTENTdm Users Group Meeting and it was a great opportunity to visit The University of Iowa and to meet the rest of the planning committee.  Being part of the program sub-committee gave me a good understanding -and an opportunity to be part- of some of the activities required to organize a regional gathering.

The keynote speaker was Kenning Arlitsch -Associate Director for IT Services at the University of Utah’s Marriott Library.  Although the focus of his talk was on the results of a survey designed to discern the perceptions and preferences of future library leaders related to organizational cultures in academic libraries; he also underlined the importance (need) for librarians to acquire more technical skills in order to keep up with constant changes in users’ expectations.

I also found two other sessions quite interesting: a) The Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI), perhaps this is another good example of a shared CONTENTdm installation serving multiple institutions and therefore sharing costs; and b) Customization, Web Services, and Storage at Ball State, this was a more technical session focused on authentication methods for viewing protected records and an off-line backup system; both topics seem to be relevant especially as libraries continue to digitize collections with some copyright restrictions.

On the second day, I was part of a panel “Collaboration & Partnership for Building Digital Collections.” Robin Crumrin and Connie Renfeld shared their experience in building the Indiana Memory project -a multi-institutional collaboration at the State level.  And with the help of Jacky Johnson, I talked about the Freedom Summer Project as an example of a multi-departmental project here at Miami.  A copy of our presentation is available here.

Last but not least, I heard it again; a major release with a new web-template option will happen this year, …look forward to checking that out!