Laurie N. Taylor July 21st, 2008
One of Zotero’s tag lines, “citation management is only the beginning,” explains its current and coming abilities rather well. The most needed component for Zotero’s widespread adopting is almost officially here with Sync Preview’s online backup and synchronization of each user’s Zotero library. Zotero 1.5 includes other improvements as well, but the most important first changes are the ability to save online and synchronize from multiple computers. That strong, centralized core offers so many amazing possibilities, especially given Zotero’s already impressive abilities.
Applications like this are exactly what web-top, Web 2.0, innovative/emerging scholarly style technologies should be. While Zotero’s Sync Preview is still under development, it’s exciting to see it coming along and so close to being here as a feature!
Laurie N. Taylor June 11th, 2008
In my last post on the Digital Library of the Caribbean presenting at ACURIL, the title for Brooke Wooldridge and Marilyn Ochoa’s presentation was incorrectly listed as “dLOC Toolkit and Usability Testing: A User-Centered Approach to Improve Electronic Resource Design” when it should have been “A User-Centered Approach to Improve Electronic Resource Design.” More importantly, I failed to list (or even realize) that Mark Sullivan from the University of Florida presented twice on the dLOC Toolkit, “dLOC Toolkit: Create Your Own Electronic Resources.”
Mark’s presentation will soon be online within dLOC here and an earlier presentation, “dLOC Technical Overview,” is already online within dLOC here.
Laurie N. Taylor May 29th, 2008
The UF Digital Library Center has a number of homegrown tools for digitization, and we’ve refined these tools working with our partners in the Digital Library of the Caribbean. Our digitization tools for the digitization process are available online with general documentation as well as a full manual with tools available for download. We also have documentation on our servers and general infrastructure as well as on our internal equipment and our day-to-day operations.
Much of this was created in response to our small team and for the Digital Library of the Caribbean, and some of it comes from our ever-changing needs and operations. In looking for documentation on other digitization projects, I haven’t found as much as I’d like in terms of available tools or documentation.
Currently, the new tools we’re evaluating include Fedora Commons (the library system and not the Fedora Linux flavor) and we’re trying to decide what other tools we need most critically right now and what tools we’ll most likely need in the near future if we do use Fedora. Given the coincidental Fedora-naming overlap, Stephanie Haas (the Assistant Director of UF’s Digital Library Center) suggested that we start calling our digitization software “hat rack” or “the hat rack suite” to note how these tools create objects that are then contained and displayed on Fedora Commons and on Fedora Linux. We’re actually running Unbuntu, but it seemed close enough, and “hat rack” presents a nice image showing the need for more rack components, more hats, and more flair for those hats.
If anyone has suggestions on where to look, please let me know. If anyone has documentation or applications that aren’t really ‘finished’, alpha and beta versions are still helpful for our team to evaluate other systems and possibilities.