Progress Update/Newsfeed Display

I have a bunch of lesson plan docs and open access journal articles ready for upload into ePrints; I will be doing most of those tomorrow morning. They should be uploaded in time for our meeting on Monday evening.

Right now I am trying to figure out the best way to have RSS content from our newsfeeds show up in the same manner as the “Newsflash” module in our current template.  I was unable to modify the existing Newsflash module, and initially I thought I would just build a new module from scratch in order to accomplish this.

That wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. It’s pretty quick to build a module that displays content from one RSS feed, but I’m guessing we want RSS feeds from multiple sources.

So…there are a couple of choices. We could have a quick and simple module that displays enviro. news content from an aggregate news source (ex. Google News). OR…we could install a already-created open source module. I vote for the second option. Let me know if you feel differently!

There are a lot of possibilities for the RSS module. I tried installing one simple one and it did not display correctly, so I uninstalled it for now. I will try a re-install shortly and double-check the CSS when I do. If that doesn’t work, there are plenty of other options.

I now know how to properly install and configure modules that others have developed, and this opens up a lot of possibilities for the ECO website. I’ll make a list of the others I come across that I think might be useful for the site.

Finally, I think we need to modify the shade of green on the site wrapper – alternatively, we need to alter the text color of the top and main menus (did we decide we were keeping or getting rid of the “main” menu and doing the top menu instead?). The light green/white combo is really tough to read. Not very user-friendly!

What do you all think?

ePrints and open archives

 I’m plugging away at the Gov Docs issue for ePrints. I have to see if I can download the public domain docs to my desktop so I can load them to ePrints. Otherwise I can just give the link if my access to Boston College’s OPAC will let me. BC is a national Gov Docs repository, and these docs are freely open to the public, so I should be able to find a way.

Also, I wonder if Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences makes the ornithology library’s audio recordings of bird sounds publically available. It is a NY State publicly funded Land-Grant institution, so I’m thinking if the library is open for public access, we might be able to post some live audio file links. That would be cool! And what about images of birds to complement their calls? I’ll check it out if you guys like the idea?

On the topic of open archives: we might want to consider requiring authentication to ePrints if we do not find enough open access items. It sounds like we can either require auth to all items or none, not by item — the answer to that quesiton…

my plans for the future…

This week I will be finishing the rest of our records in Koha.  Rather than sweating the details, I am trying to get them all basically the same while preserving the shelves created and getting the call number to appear correctly.

I also hope to find a few more feeds to spice up the site itself and get together a wireframe and blueprint for what the site could be for 1 vote out of 4…

Koha 856 field URL display?

fyi:

I’ve never tried that before. Great idea! I looked through the Koha wiki (http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php), searching for “856″ and it looks like that type of feature might still be in development.
http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=en:development:roadmap3.0&s=856Have you tried putting html code instead of just a plain url?

Finally, I suggest sending in an email to liblime. Its also possible they could have it shut off for these “demo” installations.
Let us know what you find out!
Todd

| From: Michael Sean Creedon
| Subject: Koha 856 field URL link?
| Date Sent: March 31, 2008 1:49 PM
| To: Todd Edson Marshall (tmarshal); Michael Sean Creedon (mscreedo)
|
|
| Hi Todd,
|
| Do you know off-hand if there is a way to set an item resource URL to display as a clickable link in the Koha user view by setting it in the MARC 856 field? Group 3 is interested in doing this.
|
| Thanks for any guidance you can provide!

Mike

Todd’s screen shot doc

EPrints File Availability — Authentication

EPrints Authentication

Todd’s early Discussion post on authentication:

“There are three levels access control for docs:
1) Anyone who visits the site can read it
2) People who register via the “front page” can read it
3) Staff only (accounts you specifically designated as editors or repository administrators) can read itThe only way we found to “lock content” was to make it accessible to “staff only.” Other wise, any one who visits and registers can access the articles. So, to restrict it, make the articles visible to “staff only” and make yourselves all editors or Rep. admins.This logic may seem weird, but this software is generally designed for open repositories, i.e. – open access, as oppose to closed repositories. Maybe someone can find something more in the eprints manuals/website but this was the solution we found.You may find some docs on the repository.syr.edu site open, but that is only because the person adding the doc did it wrong.

I’ve attached some screen shots to help explain this for those who may not yet be familiar with this issue.

Todd”

30 more climate change books found

I found 30 more recent books on global warming and climate change, 2005-2008, which I intend to post to Koha, and then post the gov docs electronic resources to ePrints.

electronic gov docs

I compiled a set of about 40 recent government documents on global warming and climate change in “electronic resource” format that I’d like to load to Koha and ePrints. I’ll have to continue experimenting with the SUDoc Number that is used rather than Dewey Decimal or LC Call. I’m working on this now.

Depositing to Eprints

I entered two items into Eprints so far and it was pretty straightforward. However, I am not quite sure how to restrict access to an item and am wary of putting anything in that is copyrighted. Any luck on that Mike? Another problem I noticed is that the subjects are Library of Congress numbers and not Dewey. I suppose we could manually add them into the section that is called Uncontrolled Keywords?

Template/Theme samples

I uploaded some templates that would look similar to the Garland theme that we have on this blog.  The one that I think is most similar is up now on tb3.iis.syr.edu.  There is also a completely different theme on the class test server at tb5.iis.syr.edu/kent.  Let me know what you all think.