Posts
-
Fellowship update
Below are the responses submitted for my progress update to RLUK and AHRC, ahead of our meeting on Tuesday 29 November. This provides an opportunity to reflect on my experiences, opportunities and challenges encountered during the fellowship, and how my research is enabling me to reflect on, and develop, my professional practice.
Continue reading → -
Websites with Wax
One of the reasons I was keen to develop a blog using Jekyll, was in order to learn more about Wax. Wax builds on Jekyll’s foundations - it’s a workflow that can be used make a configurable, static website with only a folder of images and a spreadsheet of image metadata.
Continue reading → -
Getting back on track
Two months into the project, I’m reviewing what I’d originally set out to do, and reflecting on progress so far. The main research focus for my project is Alma Digital – digital repository software I was responsible for implementing at Cardiff University. I had planned to use the project to investigate its potential to support academic needs. Can it support the creation of sustainable digital archives? Can it integrate with external tools to feed online exhibitions?
Continue reading → -
Universal Viewer testing and workarounds
The last month has been spent grappling with the issues I’d encountered with the Universal Viewer. In summary, updates made by Ex Libris during the summer have caused previously operational functionality to break. I’m now unable to use their product, Alma Digital, to embed the Universal Viewer as an iframe in another resource, or access dynamic coordinates (xywh values) from our object urls.
Continue reading → -
Alma Digital: issues with the Universal Viewer
My first week working on the Fellowship was spent identifying, testing, and documenting some recent issues with Alma Digital's implementation of the Universal Viewer. The Universal Viewer is designed to work with IIIF-enabled images, allowing them to be shared and embedded in other platforms, but I've recently encountered several problems with this functionality.
- Cannot copy embed code from the viewer to create an iframe in an external resource
- Zoom/position coordinates (xywh values) missing from url (viewing position cannot be captured by share link)
- Cannot load manifest to most IIIF viewers when pasting to prefixes
-
Blog like a hacker
The first thing I wanted to do when I started the Fellowship was set up a blog. Writing is how I plan, how I reflect, how I unpick problems and think my way around them. I’d heard a lot about static site generators, and something called Jekyll, as an alternative to a traditional CMS like Wordpress. It’s one of the things I was hoping I would finally have time to explore once the project started - especially given its focus on minimal computing.
Tom Preston-Werner created Jekyll for people that want to ‘blog like a hacker’. Dash off my thoughts in markdown, pass posts through simple templates, and generate a complete static website, which is secure, freely hosted, version-controlled, and served by GitHub Pages. What’s not to like?! I didn’t require much from a blog - just a place to record thoughts in a tidy, systematic way. The idea of being able to start simple, but modify any aspect of appearance or configuration, appealed to me, as someone who has always learned by fiddling with the controls.
Continue reading → -
The story so far...
Before diving into the Fellowship - a little about how I ended up here.
The early months of the COVID-19 pandemic provided both the opportunity and impetus to explore options for hosting our digital assets online, reuniting collections and researchers in a virtual space. In the world of remote work and study, a digital repository was no longer a ‘nice-to-have’ but ‘need-to-have’. However, in a model of bad timing, our repository had been decommissioned shortly before the pandemic began, and the tender process for a new one had ground to a halt in the disruption that followed. We needed a back-up plan.
Continue reading →
subscribe via RSS