This is a nice idea. It would be good to do this kind of thing with some of our collections, setting some of our images to music in an interesting way.

by eggman913

This is pretty interesting:

Apple Announces iTunes U on the iTunes Store

Apple® today announced the launch of iTunes® U, a dedicated area within the iTunes Store (www.itunes.com) featuring free content such as course lectures, language lessons, lab demonstrations, sports highlights and campus tours provided by top US colleges and universities including Stanford University, UC Berkeley, Duke University and MIT.

Of course, universities with digital repositories can make the same data discoverable through services such as OAIster and RSS feeds directly form the collections but maybe doing it through iTunes narrows the type of content down in a useful way.

We have been having some discussions with external Fez devlopers who are planning features which will allow repository items to be easily showcased in podcasts and eNewsletters e.g. an ‘Add to podcast’ button. Being able to centralise an organisation’s research data (even if it is not all stored in the one place but at least all indexed in a meaningful way in one place) and construct meaningful and structured metadata opens the door to a lot of cool stuff like this.

I’ve added a very simple little plugin that allows UQLBloggers to embed a YouTube video in their blog posts.

To enable it, log into your blog, go to the ‘plugins’ menu and click ‘activate’ next to the ‘YouTube’ plugin. From then on, any time you type something like this:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ne_WXP7lUWM]

it will result in something like this:

(This is a humorous video which I have never watched – apparently it is about libraries)

Note that the actual video remains at YouTube, it is not hosted on any library servers so it will count as internet traffic on quotas.

Thanks to Jennifer Creese for the idea and Robert Buzink for writing this plugin.

Yesterday I was part of of a Skype conference call between our development team, one of whom was at home sick and a developer in the states. We met up in campfire first, and then got the skype call going. During the call we discussed a powerpoint slide show that was posted into the campfire chat and then a few web links also shared through the chat.

Even though we sit next to each other in the office, our development team has been communicating mostly through campfire lately because we can just cut and paste code and links to each other and still be working on our code in another window and even listening to music. We don’t need to interupt each other when we are trying to concentrate on solving a problem – we can zone in and out of the group chatroom easily.

We have also had a couple of lurkers from other development groups who collaborate with us a bit on the Fez code. It has been good to have the occasional outside comments on what we’re doing and I think it has been helpful for them to know what kinds of bleeding edge development we’re doing.

Fairly early on, we told our manager about the chatroom and invited him in too. I was not sure whether allowing our mangers into the chatroom would be a vibe killer but it has worked out quite well. Obviously this depends greatly on the kind of management you have but in our case I think it has served in two ways – our manager can get that warm fuzzy feeling of seeing the team actually getting things done™. For some of the other staff here who are supporting our actual users, it has meant that at least one of us is paying attention to answer questions (usually) while the others of us might be in full-code-imersion mode. So there is the counterintuitive result of less interruptions.

Here’s a quick site that explains a concept for helping people understand how and why they might use a computer resource you have. I guess the concept can apply to any service that you want to raise awareness about.

IA One Sheeters

One-Sheeters are quick and easy marketing tools for information architects. They’re like mini brochures to advertise IA deliverables and promote the IA practice in your company. One-Sheeters help people envision what deliverables you produce and where they fit into a project. They’re quick to produce and easy for anyone to understand.

It turns out that the popularity of Libraries has increased over the last decade according to the ALA. Their report subtitled Predicted demise due to Internet fails to materialize was linked in our UQ Library newsletter today and reads as good news to libraries everywhere.

New data on U.S. libraries shows almost two billion served

“Far from hurting American libraries, the Internet has actually helped to spur more people to use their local libraries because it has increased our hunger for knowledge and information,” said Loriene Roy, president-elect of the American Library Association. According the ALA report, virtually every library in the United States – 99 percent – provides free public computer access to the Internet, a four-fold increase in the percentage of libraries providing such free access over the last decade. By comparison, Roy pointed to another study released in March showing that only 69 percent of U.S. households have Internet access.

They are attributing much of this rise in popularity to free internet access. The article stresses the importance of access to information guidance from professionals (aka librarians). Does this mean that librarians are now just people who know how to type the right keywords into google?

Knowing how to find stuff online is an important skill which requires experience and instinct. Our library newsletter frequently reports “praise for a job well done”, usually involving a story of someone who spent hours making no progress before receiving help from a competent librarian. A lot of this hinges on being approachable and looking like you know what you’re doing without making people feel stupid (oh yeah: and actually knowing how to search for stuff).

As a non-librarian computer programmer, I think librarians need to go beyond spruking l33t searching skillz though. Librarians should also be stressing the reverse of searching: knowing how to put stuff on the internet in such a way that it will be found. I might be a bit biased since I’m helping write digital repository software but I think that knowing all about digital repositories is a very marketable skillset. Knowing all about metadata and it’s uses is both rewarding and a great conversation topic at parties.

Developing really good metadata plays an important part in inventing new ways of assembling and using data. I’ve seen some very cool things in google earth recently and a lot of innovation coming out of LibraryThing . None of this could happen without people organising their metadata in a discoverable and standards complient way.

I suppose my view of things is very coloured by coming from an IT perspective so let me know if I’m wrong but I think that the job title Librarian will become more and more associated with knowing all about metadata which translates to skills in putting as well as getting.

I went to the APSR Market day on Friday to spruke Fez generally but also in relation to RQF . As well as giving my talk, it was good to see the other repository projects are offering and what they had to say about RQF.

The morning started with a talk from Sandra Fox from DEST: Not much different to the information given in February though I wasn’t there for the infamous DEST-bashing in Feb and also arrived late due to my flight so didn’t get all of Sandra’s talk (so this whole paragraph is a bit second hand – sorry about that). The general comments throughout the day were that Sandra is making the best of a tough job and bearing the brunt of the stress caused by RQF on some fronts.

The Dspace guys vented a bit of frustration at Dspace over a few things they’d really like to see change but then came back after morning tea and assured us that Dspace is their repository of choice. I guess their point was that no repository can be the “do everything” software, especially when it comes to the RQF requirements. Andrew (i.e. my boss here at UQL) also mentioned that Fez will only be part of the RQF solution at UQ for the same reasons – that a repository isn’t a content managment and business workflows system (though Fez can do a little bit of those things).

Some of the limitations of repositories in general when it coems to RQF is that we’d want to be able to select articles for the RQF without everyone knowing publically or even without authors knowing. The requirement for freezing objects in time throughout the assessment and the general workflows of selecting the four best papers and generating the output packages for DEST are also challenges for repositories.

I didn’t get a look at the new ePrints 3 but heard that one innovation is that when a user uploads a document, they are not confronted with a big metadata entry form but rather just enter a title and upload the document. Once the document is uploaded, the user can come back and enter the complete metadata in chunks. Apparently, once the document is in the system, the owner is a bit more committed to entering it’s metadata. In Fez, a user might get to that big metadata entry screen and bail out because it looks too hard – especially with all the required fields. The Fez workflows could be improved so that they chunk up the metadata entry screens and allow incomplete records to be saved in the unpublished state at least.

We were given a quick look at the new Vital . I noticed that they indicate if the fulltext is stored in the record when they do a listing. Fez currently shows thumbnails in the listings for image records – it would be nice to see maybe some icons for PDFs and things for our records with fulltext or even indicate the database for records that link to external fulltext (like the icon or name of the database perhaps).

There was a lot of interest in the ProQuest Digital Commons software probably because they have been the unknown quantity for the group at the market day. ProQuest had the most questions from the floor where as I got the impression that most people there already knew all about Fez, DSpace and ePrints. Most of the questions were about pricing and the relationship between a repository host and it’s customers rather than the technicalities of RQF requirements though.

Something that was also noted early on was that a disadvantage of open source is that you need a fairly strong IT capability to modify the software. The advantage, of course, is that if you can get your hands on some programmers, you can modify the software to do exactly what you need (within reason I guess) and have a lot of control over that. On the other hand, the turn-key solutions from ProQuest, VTLS and even ePrints hosting means that you can set things up without the hassel of trying to communicate with software geeks (you get to talk to sales people instead). While the hosted solutions are happy to have input from their customers, the level of responsiveness will vary according to how much money you have and/or whether what you want has a business case.

With all the interest in hosting and turn-key repositories, it would have been good to have the Fez hosting up and running to show off. Stay tuned for more updates in that area.

UPDATE: Presentation slideshows

I just started work on a behaviour for a new workflow in Fez and had a quick fish around for another workflow to base it on. I realised that for a ‘non-auto’ behaviour, preview.php is a good place to look as it just has the workflow wrapper code and then includes another file.

 include_once("../config.inc.php");
 include_once(APP_INC_PATH . "class.template.php");
 include_once(APP_INC_PATH . "class.workflow_status.php");
 // include whatever else you need here
 $tpl = new Template_API();
 // set the workflow wrapper template
 $tpl->setTemplate("workflow/index.tpl.html");  
 // set the template that the workflow template will include
 $tpl->assign('type',"preview"); 
 // restore WorkflowStatus object from the session
 $wfstatus = &WorkflowStatusStatic::getSession(); 
 $pid = $wfstatus->pid;
 // set up the basic templates variable you need for a workflow
 $wfstatus->setTemplateVars($tpl);  
 // handle any form input processing here
 // check if the user clicked a button to go to another state
 $wfstatus->checkStateChange();  
 // Do all your display work for generating the form and page content
 $tpl->displayTemplateRecord($pid);

Simple eh?

This is a technologically inspiring use of data and quite relevent for me this month (click link to see the video that Mr Bibliotech is talking about):

Roller Coaster Home Prices » BiblioTech Web

Here’s a TERRIFIC use of available technologies to illustrate a concept. Someone has take the housing prices from 1890 to the present, adjusted them for inflation, plotted the chart, and then used Rollercoaster Tycoon to make a rollercoaster ride version of the chart.

Do you have word docs in your Fez install? Want users to be able to fulltext search em? Well Jonathan Harker of Catalyst recently added support for Word doc fulltext indexing and it wasn’t that hard! I’ve added the details to the Fez Wiki:

Fulltext Index Word Docs – FezWiki

First you need a way to convert the document to plain text. This example uses Antiword but it is also possible with catdoc.