TIS Lab

Screen captures of the HRDI site

We’ve just launched the site for the Human Rights Documentation Initiative!  In July 2008, the University of Texas received a grant from the Bridgeway Foundation to collect and preserve fragile resources related to the Rwandan genocide and a variety of human rights issues.  The Libraries assembled a project team, assessed what partners and resources were already available here on campus, and partnered with Archive-It to begin a quarterly harvesting of URLs which will be made available via the site under Archived Web Resources.

Our team was tasked with creating a web-based interface that provides access to human rights documentation through variety of different resources including the archived URLs , physical collections of materials here at UT, the UT Libraries catalog, the UT Digital Repository, Texas Archival Resources Online, and other outside entities.  Metadata like Library of Congress Subject Headings, language, and abstracts are assigned to all the archived URLs which allowed us to incorporate a variety of search and browse options to aid discovery.

We also wanted to highlight branch libraries and student organizations involved in human rights work as well as include information on events on and around campus.

Graphically, we used hopeful, empowering images and really focused on the documentation aspect, including a rotating featured collection prominently placed on the home page.

As the site requirements developed, we added the HRDI Updates blog where the site’s content manager can provide updates on new collections, press, travelogues and photos, etc.

Some things we’d love to incorporate in future iterations are a federated search of the many available resources, ability to limit search based on format (video, mp3, PDF, etc), more options for sorting/clustering results, a robust events calendar with the option to subscribe to a newsletter, and additional languages.

Read more about the site launch or more about the Bridgeway grant.

Please feel free to send questions or feedback about the site to Jade Anderson or T-Kay Sangwand.

In the past, the UT Libraries have had a variety of independent pages that list subject-related information. These pages include databases by subject, subject guides, subject specialists, and so on. TIS identified several issues with that approach:

• Subject names were not consistent. One page might list a subject called Children’s Studies, while another might call it Youth Studies.
• Subject pages were not integrated. If a user was browsing databases by subject, there was no easy way to view that subject’s bibliographer.
• Maintenance was difficult. If a specialist changer his/her office, that information needed to be updated in several places.

Our solution was to create a single database of subjects that contains all of the relevant information in one location. This database can be updated using a password-protected web interface. Now, if we decide to change “Theater” to “Theatre”, we make that update in one location and the change is reflected throughout our site.

Below is a list of pages that are currently using the new subjects database:

• Research by Subject – In the past, this page simply linked to research guides. Now, it links to guides, databases, and specialist information.
• Subject Detail pages – In addition to listing the information from the Research by Subject page, this page also provides links to related subjects.
• Specialist Profile pages – This page serves as a profile page for subject specialists. The contact information is pulled from the campus directory, which prevents us from having to maintain that information. It also lists interests, publications, personal sites, degrees, and more.
• Databases by Subject – Previously, this page only listed databases for each subject. Now, it lists recommended databases and provides links to that subject’s detail page and the specialist profile page.

We plan on using the data from new database on several other pages in the future. For example, we will integrate it with our existing library2blackboard application and an upcoming mobile version of our site. The work invested in this project will hopefully pay dividends long into the future.

The following post was contributed by our Outreach Librarian, Meghan Sitar…

The University of Texas Libraries have maintained a presence in Facebook for several years now, starting as a Group before transitioning to one of the newer Fan Pages.  We’ve used this space to post content from our other social media sites, including blog posts from our New for Undergraduates blog, video tutorials posted on YouTube, and event photos published on Flickr.

With the redesign of Fan Pages and the ability to publish our content to our fans’ News Feeds, it seemed like a good time to reexamine how we were managing all of this and to look for methods of automating the interaction between all of these different sites.  At the same time, we had been hearing from students who wanted to see us on Twitter, which seems to have finally gained some popularity among students on campus.

Matt Lisle, our intrepid Instructional Designer, had the brilliant idea to link Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Youtube, and our Wordpress blogs together using FriendFeed.

This is where things get a little complicated.

When one of these sites posts to FriendFeed, the post is then exported to Twitter.

Using a Facebook application called Twitter Fan Page Sync, we’ve linked together our Twitter account and our Facebook Fan Page.  Twitter then posts the same information it receives from the Friend Feed to the status on our Facebook Fan Page.

Perhaps an illustration is in order?

(Click the image to see the full version)

The benefit of this system is that the cross-posting between all of these outlets is automated and no one person is responsible for repurposing the content.  The time investment in posting to any one of these sites returns a greater yield since the visibility of that post is at least doubled.

We’ve seen some problems with the stability of the Facebook application.  While the FriendFeed postings are readily feeding to Twitter and then to Facebook, direct posts to Twitter only showed up in Facebook onces we installed a second Facebook application, Selective Twitter Status, which requires tweets to include a #fb at the end.

That small nuisance aside, we’re pleased to have found a way to consolidate our social media empire into one relatively simple system.

• UT Libraries on Facebook
• UT Libraries on Twitter
• UT Libraries on Friendfeed

As reported during the last Web Author Brown Bag, work has progressed on the Content Management System for the Libraries’ site. Web Authors have added to and maintained the following sections; News Releases, Army Map Service Maps, For Undergraduates, Perry-Castañeda Library and the Computer Science subject guide. In addition, two of the Web Authors who did not edit their content before, have been editing their content in the CMS in order to provide a realistic evaluation of the system.

Title:	CMS Site Sections
Description:

Noted features include…

• Managing users/groups and roles
• Editing content in the browser
• Tagging and automating views of content (Ex: RSS, News Releases and Tag Clouds )
• Managing/inserting Media, PDFs and Documents
• Scheduling publication
• Saving and comparing revisions
• Tracking page views

Title:	Features
Description:

Additional server configurations have been performed to optimize performance, flexibility and dependability. We are now ready to start the last phase of the evaluation. Thursday, April 22, the Library will display the News Releases, Perry-Castañeda Library, AMS Maps and Computer Science Subject Guide on the development server in preparation for publishing after all stakeholders have had a chance to review. This will help determine the scalability of the CMS and provide valuable information for further improvements.

A few months ago, we announced that the University of Texas Libraries created an application that would integrate subject-specific library information into Blackboard courses. Finally, we’ve gotten around to sharing our code.

• First, read our previous post that explains how to use template variables in Blackboard
• Then, go to http://code.google.com/p/library2blackboard/ to obtain a php script, 2 sample xml files, and an html file for testing.

TIS, along with our Instruction staff, created a new All About Plagiarism tutorial that teaches students to:

• Define plagiarism
• Determine what sources need to be cited in your writing
• Paraphrase the words of others
• Effectively incorporate quotations in your own writing
• Describe other methods that can be used to avoid plagiarism

The tutorial also includes some helpful tools for instructors, including the ability to embed portions of the tutorial into their own courses and a test that can be imported into Blackboard.

Feel free to point your students, faculty, or coworkers to our tutorial.

We are now offering the option of sending an SMS message to reference librarians by using the AOL IM hack described here. This enables us to answer questions via instant messaging, which means that we can answer these questions alongside those that we receive from our chat with a librarian service.

The text messages have already started rolling in. Hopefully this new service will be useful to students, faculty, and staff at UT.

Just saw that LibraryThing has launched their free cover images.  As they say in the page, they don’t necessarily have as many covers as some other services or as many options in the image api.  However, they ARE free and available under fewer restrictions than those other services.

Here’s the announcement

The University of Texas Libraries just launched a new reviews feature in our Library Catalog. We used Wordpress to create a blog that stores all of the reviews. By using the TDO Mini Forms plugin for Wordpress, we were able to provide a way for users to submit content to the blog. Each user-submitted posts goes through a moderation process where they are approved or rejected by someone at the library. Then, using a bit of Javascript and PHP, we were able to embed the reviews within an iframe in our library catalog. Click here for an example.

Hopefully our users will find this new feature to be a useful addition to the information provided in the catalog.

We have been working for some time now to identify whether a Content Management System would help alleviate some of our site management issues.  A small group of stakeholders here in the library has been working to evaluate our open source options and test building content and managing it to see if any of them are a fit.  We were initially interested in Lenya, Joomla, Plone and Drupal.  Today, we released our report to the library administration.  We will most likely be working with Drupal as the closest fit to our existing skill sets and will be moving forward with a production evaluation of several key areas of our site.  That will allow us to get a better feel as to whether it can be installed in an environment like our systems staff have built and whether it can be configured so that it can handle the load that we know we will be throwing at it if we were to shift the entire site over.