Elias Tzoc blog!

Yes, today is the day!
Our first digital collection in DSpace is about to go “live” and I think there is reason to celebrate …for instance: it’ll be our very first digital collection in an Open Source System and with a dynamic image viewer (using OpenZoom); and perhaps most importantly, users now will have the ability to:
a) view/zoom individual pages using a full-screen option;
b) download a single PDF file for any given issue;
c) browse the collection using a calendar view; and
d) browse the collection using mobile devices (particularly the iPads).

Here is “sneak peak” of what it’ll be:

…now back to the final “tweaks” -before we officially switch to the new URL
.

It’s been almost a week already since I first got an iPad …why now? well, with the all the attention that “mobile” services are getting in the media, our Digital Initiatives team proposed/decided to start “prototyping” a mobile version -of the The Miami Student Newspaper Archive in DSpace- for the iPads.  This “apple” device seems to a very good candidate for digital collections; its display (1024×768) makes it an ideal choice for displaying medium-large images such as newspaper pages, maps, manuscripts, etc.

Today’s test looked like this:

The actual work/test will involve a couple processes: a) decide which format to use, current choices are PDF or DjVu; b) export/create an XML file from DSpace with at least four fields: title, publication date, handle, and a URL for the actual file to display; c) modify a calendar page -for browsing- with the appropriate CSS and JavaScript files for the iPad; and hopefully that’s it!

For the regular website of this LSTA-funded project, we’re using an open source tool (OpenZoom) which does an excellent job in displaying large newspaper images with zooming and full-screen options –very cool! …but it’s based on flash, so that’s why we have to use a different format for the iPad test.  And speaking of flash issues on the web, this afternoon I came across this presentation “HTML5’s Multimedia Future” which was part of the OSCON 2010 – O’Reilly Conference in Portland, Oregon.  It seems like HTML5 will make a big difference on the use of multimedia on the web.

On a separate -but related note- I think the iPad is just what I needed to stop printing articles; as happy as I was with the double-sided option on my printer, this new device seems to be a better choice, especially if I try to go green …we’ll see how it goes!