Elias Tzoc blog!

March seems to be -yet- another month to talk about technical skills.   First, as co-chair of TEDSIG, this week we’re finalizing the details for our upcoming spring workshop on Technical/Cataloguing Skills -which will include three presentations by librarians who have been working/cataloguing digital resources in three important projects at the local, state, and national levels.  The two ultimate goals are: a) to learn about the technical/cataloging skills that have worked for others; and b) to identify existing formal/informal opportunities for learning those skills.  The planning process has been a great reminder that even a one-day event takes some good time for coordinating the details … there will a full event’s page on the ALAO website soon, and a flyer will include the following information:

This month also started with some unique technical questions, on March 1-2 we had a guest -Hsianghui Liu-Spencer, Digital Services Librarian at Carleton College, she was here to talk with us about some of the customization work we implemented in CONTENTdm back in 2009-2010.  For me, it was a great opportunity to “test” some of my scripts and even though they weren’t perfect, I think it’s fair to say that they/we passed the test … working with Hsianghui’s sandbox was another example of the need/importance of having access to a local web-server for basic developments or tests.  This week, it was also nice to reply to an email regarding the Share-It feature for image collections in CONTENTdm, unfortunately, it seems like the back-end files between 4.x and 6.x have changed a lot, so I’m afraid that my code won’t work anymore

Last but not least, the new iPad 3 came also as a reminder to one of our projects for this year, that is, a non-flash based image viewer for multi-page digitized files.  We’re definitely looking at IIPMooViewer … speaking of image viewers, I’ve heard that my article on “Document Viewers for Non‐Born‐Digital Files in DSpace” will be published in the Journal of Digital Information soon … and now, just for fun, if you ever get asked the question “Will the iPad ever get flash support?” a good answer may include this link –written in 2010 by Mr. Jobs.

… happy Friday!

.

This year, as part of the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War, the Miami University Libraries are creating digital collections of important Civil War (CW) materials currently housed in the Walter Havinghurst Special Collections. So far, two collections are under development: Civil War Diaries Collection and Samuel Richey Collection of the Southern Confederacy. In terms of providing online access to these digitized manuscripts or to any non-born-digital file … despite the current technologies (e.g. Djatoka Image Server, IIP Image Server, DjVu Libre, XTF, or the IA BookReader), there seems to room for changes in order to provide a enhanced user experience for digitized multi-page items.

So back to our CW collections, since we’re loading the data into a DSpace repository -hosted at OhioLINK- we’ve been “testing” a couple of options for the image viewer. The ultimate goal will be to use the new IIP Viewer currently on “test” mode.

The viewer -will- feature a toolbar with options for zooming, panning, rotating and viewing images in full screen mode; the viewer also includes a navigation box with thumbnails helps in browsing multi-page files. But since this is not ready -yet- for a DSpace production instance, a plan B has been to re-use a DjVu/JPG viewer that has worked well for us in the past. It may not be as catchy as the IIP viewer, but it features a basic toolbar with zoom and page navigation options … and perhaps the big plus is that because it uses regular JPG files for display, it works great on any device and/or browser -which is not true for the flash-based IIP viewer.

Anyway, either viewer will -soon- allow us to provide access to large, high-resolution, and multi-page objects in these two Civil War collections. A first formal presentation is scheduled for October 22nd at the Symposium “The American Civil War: Why It Still Matters” in King Library Room 320. The symposium is officially the kick-off for a grant-funded reading and discussion series “Let’s Talk About It: Making Sense of the American Civil War” sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Library Association, and the Miami University Humanities Center. More information about this program is available at: http://libguides.lib.muohio.edu/civilwar

Ok, that’s it for today … now back to an outdated -but sill needed- DSpace document on XMLUI tips & tricks … as well as to complete the copyright assignment form for an article I co-authored on “Technical Skills for New Digital Librarians” scheduled for publication next month in Library Hi Tech News.

.