The past couple weeks have made me feel hopeful about the website portal and the digital collection. First, regarding the digital collection, Todd Peters, our Computer Information Services Librarian, fixed the banner display issue. Then, he was able to get rid of the funky formatting and error-message issues. Now he is working on getting our media to stream through the library's streaming server, rather than through Quicktime.
If this works, almost everyone should be able to stream the audio and video in the collection, and skip around quickly to different parts of the file--thus making it more feasible to put up entire a/v files, rather than sample clips. I might have to convert all the current mp4 files to Flash, but it will probably be worth the effort. Anyway, Todd's been and continues to be a huge help lately in getting CONTENTdm customization under control.
Regarding the website, I met today with John Powell, an assistant professor of communication design at Texas State, who has volunteered to revamp it into a more dynamic website, and transition to a content management system (like Drupal) to better manage the content and design. This would also allow the addition of more seamless interactive features, like a blog or a discussion forum, and site searching.
John and I seem to be on the same page, wanting to utilize one another's strengths (his knowledge of web design and mine of the subject matter and research methods) in this endeavor. He's also interested in learning more about the subject, in order to provide better ideas for me. He's going to find out some technical information from our IT guys, then come up with a "wire frame" proposal for the new design.
Stay tuned for further developments!
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