Elias Tzoc blog!

On February 19th, I participated in the Amigos & CONTENTdm Online Conference.  As usual, it was a great opportunity to “virtually” meet, listen, and learn from other colleagues who are working on digital projects.

The day started with a talk by Claire Cocco titled “CONTENTdm End-User Experience Redesign: A User-centered design approach.“  I thought it was interesting to learn about some of the results of a usability study -using usabilla- they conducted last year.  For instance, the difference between end-users and librarians (CONTENTdm users) when displaying images and metadata.  The new “facet” feature will be an interesting one to follow in the near future.

For the concurrent sessions, I attended 3 of them: CONTENTdm and OAI-PMH: How to Optimize Content Discovery by Amy Jackson; Opening Pandora’s Box: Electronic Theses & Dissertations by Robin Leech; and Take This Code and Shove It - RSS/Facebook Integration by Dean Farrell and Jennifer Ricker.  A great advantage for participants at this online conference is that Amigos recorded all the sessions and participants can log-in -later- and watch sessions that they couldn’t attend.  I think that was great!

Last, I was also happy to share some of the web customization we’ve implemented here at Miami.  The title of my talk was “Helping Users Search/Browse/Share CONTENTdm collections” -in case someone is interested, the pages I used for my demos are: Re-Indexing CONTENTdm and Share-It: embedding CONTENTdm images.  Ok, that’s it for now.  A follow up on this topic will be part of a poster session this summer at the 2010 ALA Annual Conference -see you in DC!