Bookings are now open for a free 2-day developer workshop/hackathon which aims to encourage take-up and further development of tools developed by the IMPACT Project. The workshop is intended for developers and implementers. It will allow them to take a closer look at the tools available and investigate new solutions and features that could be developed for the benefit of the wider community.
Full details including how to book your place are available in a news feature on the UKOLN Web site.
Paul Walk, Deputy Director, UKOLN, and Thom Bunting, Web Manager (eFramework and JISC IE Technical Foundations), UKOLN, will both be contributing to sessions on 27 July 2011 at the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2011 (IWMW 2011). Thom in a computer-lab-based session entitled Doing Drupal: quick start deployments via distributions will focus on a distribution providing automated content and data aggregation, tagging, mapping, and trend visualisation. Paul, conscious of the the lack of career options for successful Web developers in many HE institutions will explore the possible development of a new role in the sector – The Strategic Developer – a developer who has both technical and domain experience, and who can contribute to strategic planning and decision making.
Issue 67 of Ariadne has appeared recently. A summary of the main articles and next steps is available in a news feature on the UKOLN Web site.
A free one-day DevCSI/Sourcesense workshop which will provide a thorough introduction to SOLR will be held at the London Mathematical Society on Monday 15 August 2011. Further information and a booking form are available on the UKOLN Web site.
This workshop is an introductory tutorial on Apache Solr, an open source enterprise search engine with a restful Web interface. The event will be run by Sourcesense.
The tutorial will start by looking at basic searches, and go on to consider some more sophisticated queries such as highlighting, spellchecking, faceting, etc. The focus will then move to indexing and how to make use of the sample data within SOLR. It will also examine a small Java application to index sample content from Wikipedia.
Further details are available on the UKOLN Web site.
UKOLN is advising users of the following services that there will be a scheduled period of downtime on Thursday 21 July 2011:
This newsfeed service, UKOLN News, together with all the UKOLN blogs, namely:
UKOLN Update
LOCAH Project blog
The Metadata Forum blog
SageCite blog
Patients Participate! blog
I2S2 blog
JISC Beginner’s Guide to Digital Preservation
eFragments Blog
Cultural Heritage Blog
JISC IE Technical Foundations blog
Digital Curation Blog
Application Profiles Support Blog
UKOLN Dev
Rest assured that the UKOLN Web site, Ariadne Web Magazine and the International Journal of Digital Curation will remain available while email contact will also be unaffected.
DevCSI will be organising a free Repository Hackathon/Challenge at Repository Fringe this year between Wednesday 3 and Thursday 4 August 2011, in Edinburgh.
Its purpose is to encourage repository developers, repository managers and experts in the domain, many of whom are attending RepoFringe11, to come up with ideas, and then for some to work on these prototypes during a ‘hackathon’. The ideas/prototypes will be presented to an audience and the best ones will receive prizes.
We are looking for entries that reflect the conference theme this year, Repositories Building Bridges & Social Innovation.
Further information about the Hackathon is available. To book for Repository Fringe 2011, a booking form is also available.
The WordPress plugin Digress.it which offers paragraph-level commenting allows for discussions of documents which are republished using WordPress. This plugin is in use in a variety of blogs such as JISCPress.org, WriteToReply and UKOLN’s W3C linked library data incubator blog. However there is currently a bug with Digress.it which sometimes means the blog will not display. The developers of Digress.it are currently looking into resolving this problem. We will provide an update as soon as possible.