In August the MATRIX/History Department Africa Past and Present podcast, co-hosted by Peter Alegi and Peter Limb, set new records for unique visitors and for total number of visits in a single month. With four months left (and six more shows) in 2009, download stats are already nearly double the downloads from all of 2008. Thanks for listening!

The Women in Science website is a new digital media archive that uses KORA, MATRIX’s digital repository application, to deliver text access to the written works of several women scientists, including the works of the marquise Du Châtelet, and biographies written by leading historians of science.

The website is available through the participation and support of the MSU Department of History, the MSU Lyman Briggs College, and the MSU Libraries.

To visit the Women in Science website, visit http://womeninscience.history.msu.edu/

To learn about KORA, visit http://www2.matrix.msu.edu/kora/

Updates for the KORA 1.1.0 content management system have been released. This update adds several new features including a new API to retrieve information
from the system as well as new features and bug fixes for existing data controls.

From the release notes…

New Features:

• The KORA_Search library was extended to support syntax similar to MySQL’sLIMIT command for returning a finite number of results
• A Database Versioning System was added to allow changes to the database between KORA version to be automatically populated
• The option to edit information about a Scheme after its creation was added
• Project Administrators now have a “View All” option available in Search Results
• CSS Stylesheets can now be specified for each individual project
• Support for Scheme Layout Presets (that is, creating a new scheme based on the layout of an existing scheme) was added
• All controls except for File and Image now support Default Values
• Pressing the back button after failed ingestion will restore all entered data except for file/image controls
• Added API for accessing KORA data in XML format through GET variables for use with Flash, etc. This is still largely untested and undocumented.

Bug Fixes:

• A bug in the KORA_Search library causing records from improper schemes to be returned was fixed.
• The List (Multiple Select) control was changed so that options can no longer have whitespace at the beginning or ending, which was causing problems with Javascript.
• The “Washington, DC” option in the State List Preset was changed to “District of Columbia” * AJAX calls were cleaned up with per-page IDs to prevent incorrect functions being called due to use of include()
• Fixed a bug which casued the deleteScheme() function to corrupt values of the sequence column in the database
• Fixed bug wherein Associator Control would search over all projects it claimed to have access to without checking against the scheme’s permissions
• Fixed issue wherein Associator Control would only allow you to select permissions for one scheme from each project
• The ‘baseURL’ variable in conf.php was changed to ‘baseURI’ to avoid namespace conflicts with other applications

For more information, visit http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=212072

The John Snow Archive and Research Companion has been updated from its original XHTML format to use KORA. Our content manager, Peter Vinten-Johansen, can now ingest and deliver digital texts, images, and their corresponding metadata through KORA. All items within Snow’s Works, Snow’s Contemporaries, Interpretive Studies, and the Bibliography section are displayed from KORA and searchable through the online Document Search.

To read more about John Snow, visit http://matrix.msu.edu/~johnsnow

To learn about KORA, visit http://www2.matrix.msu.edu/kora/

MATRIX and the MSU African Studies Center have launched the redesigned and expanded African Activist Archive website. The more than 1300 photographs, posters, historical documents, political buttons, T-shirts, and streaming audio and video are a strong beginning at documenting the U.S. movement supporting freedom and justice in Africa, especially Southern Africa. The project is preserving records and memories of activism on Africa during the past 50 years and welcomes people with materials and personal remembrances to add them to the online archive.

KORA 1.0.0 has been released. This full version release includes bug fixes from the KORA 1.0.0-beta release and additional features, including fixity checking and enhanced documentation.

You can obtain KORA 1.0.0 from sourceforge:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=212072

The School of Labor and Industrial Relations at Michigan State University has launched their new MATRIX designed website.

MATRIX played an integral roll throughout the design process. Our design team shared critical information architecture knowledge and web design skills with the School of Labor and Industrial Relations staff. They also developed the code for all the web pages and added the content.

The site will be hosted on MATRIX servers and administered by the School of Labor and Industrial Relation’s webmaster.

The new Michigan State University Sports History website launched last week as a continuing collaborative effort between MATRIX, the MSU Department of History, and the University Archives & Historical Collections of MSU.

The site contains images and associated metadata collected by the history class “History of Sports in America” taught by history professor, Juan Javier Pescador.

This website is the first step of a collaborative effort to develop a metadata standard that participants hope will be used across campus.

The technology behind the website is driven by an infrastructure for managing and delivering digital objections through the creation of the MATRIX application KORA.

MATRIX assisted the Michigan State University Museum Studies Program in the launch of their new website last week.

The work was a collaborative effort by various members of the MATRIX design team with MSU Museum curator Marsha MacDowell. MATRIX also provides web hosting for the site.

The Michigan State University Museum Studies Program prepares individuals for innovative careers in museums and non-profit institutions.