Elias Tzoc blog!

As in most places, this week is the last official summer week and soon campuses will start a new school year.  So this afternoon, I decided to review my notes and found a list of activities that kept me “entertained” in the last 2-3 months.  It’s always interesting to look back and realize that even though we don’t always get done with everything we plan to, there are also unexpected and positive activities that we can accomplish -on the way- sometimes without too much time for planning.

Anyway, my 2011 summer went … somehow like this:

• Open Repositories Conference, in early June I joined a group of poster presenters at this conference in Austin, TX … and as I follow up, I’m now finishing up a manuscript on the topic of Document Viewers for DSpace.
• Diversity & Inclusion, in late June I joined a group of Miami colleagues in a two-day seminar on Privilege and Allies facilitated by Frances Kendall; on the first day, it was great to complement a conversation and point out a couple of digital collections we have on the topic of diversity.
• New Office, in July I got a “new” office, this was part of the renovation of our new department –now known as the Center for Digital Scholarship, it’s an expansion to Digital Initiatives, but now with a more public focus to faculty’s research and scholarship.
• ALAO Board Retreat, as co-chair of TEDSIG and since I missed last year’s meeting, in July I attended this two-day meeting at the Deer Creek State Park.  In early June I also contributed an entry for the ALAO Newsletter.
• New Website, a big chunk of my summer was devoted to customizing a new front-end for our digital collections using DSpace and hosted at OhioLINK; the new site should go live soon and it will include a new jp2 viewer developed by OhioLINK. Modifying the behavior of the AspectBrowser was a big lesson.
• ALA recruiting, in late July we re-connected with our group and in early August we began working on the publicity materials for this program; my goals will be to contact a couple of candidates -either Latinos or someone with interest in computer programming and libraries.
• Flickr Commons, in July we learned that our two collections in Flickr are “ready” to be added to The Flickr Commons; I’ve helped drafting a copy of the copyright statement and it should be officially added soon!
• Writing & Proposals, in June I helped in completing and submitting a manuscript on Technical Skills for New Digital Librarians; I also helped in translating and submitting two case studies for an IFLA publication on Libraries for Indigenous Population.
• Replying inquiries, in July I received and replied two emails and a phone call regarding our 2010 LSTA project on migrating a student newspaper collection from CONTENTdm to DSpace; it’s always good to get some feedback and share with others about the work we’ve done.
• Civil War, in June I helped in developing a temporary website for our new Civil War collection; in July we also began working on a grant-funded project for a series of book discussion on the Civil War –this is part of the ALA/NEH program.
• SAA & Accessibility, as part of this working group’s preparation for the upcoming 2011 SAA conference, this week I completed a second revision/update to the Spanish version of the pamphlet on Accessibility & Archives … I also recorded an mp3 file for the MOVER card.

…ok, that’s it for this summer, now it’s time to get ready for a short presentation scheduled for Monday afternoon!

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