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Matthew Geimer, CTO at MATRIX, attended Google I/O 2009 at the Moscone Center in San Fransisco, CA.  The conference focused on many aspects of new technologies involving web development, as well as mobile application developlment and the Google APIs and toolkits available.  MATRIX is excited with the new features available in HTML 5 showcased at I/O 2009 as well as the many other products showcased.  The keynote speeches are available at the I/O 2009 website and many of the sessions are available on YouTube.

In April, the African Language Materials Archive (ALMA) launched a new website.  The ALMA site, hosted by MATRIX, contains African language video recordings, documentary video, translation work, and bibliographies.  African Immigrant Voices Project, one of several AMLA treasures available through the new website, captures the plight and the lives of African diaspora emigrés.  This project features a dozen interviews in nine African languages.

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

At the second digital curation curriculum symposium of the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina (April 1-3), Lisa M. Schmidt, MATRIX’s electronic records archivist, will be presenting the poster “Preserving Electronic Mailing Lists: The H-Net Archive.” DigCCurr 2009: Digital Curation Practice, Promise and Prospects is part of the Preserving Access to Our Digital Future: Building an International Digital Curation Curriculum (DigCCurr) project. DigCCurr is a three-year (2006-2009), Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)-funded collaboration between SILS and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). The symposium includes presentations on approaches to developing a graduate-level digital curation curricular framework as well as recent research in the field of digital preservation.

View poster (ppt)
View poster abstract (doc)

MATRIX is pleased to announce that it has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Startup Grant for the Red Land/Black Land: Teaching Ancient Egyptian History Through Game Based Learning project. Led by MATRIX Assistant Professor Ethan Watrall, the project will produce a Civilization IV mod designed to provide players with an opportunity to explore the process of social and historical change in ancient Egypt from the early Predynastic period (ca. 4000 B.C.) until the end of the Third Intermediate Period (ca. 525 B.C.). Further, the game will include supplementary content that explores the construction of historical knowledge – addressing questions of how historians and archaeologists know what they do about ancient Egypt. In addition to specific learning outcomes, the games is intended to provide an ethical and accurate counterpoint to the wealth of existing main stream commercial video games that draw upon pseudo-historical and pseudo-archaeological notions of ancient Egypt in order to craft an experience that is presented in a historically accurate manner.

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/

The article “Preserving the H-Net Academic Electronic Mail Lists” by MATRIX’s Electronic Records Archivist Lisa M. Schmidt has been published online as a Society of American Archivists Campus Case Study. To view this article visit http://www.archivists.org/publications/epubs/CampusCaseStudies/casestudies/Case11-Schmidt.pdf.

This article is part of a MATRIX project with H-Net to preserve and improve access to H-Net’s specialized electronic mailing list archives. More information on this project can be found at http://www.h-net.org/archive/.

To view other articles published by MATRIX staff, visit our Publications and Presentations page.

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.

After a year in development, Ethan Watrall has published his latest book, Head First Web Design.  Published by acclaimed technology publisher O’Reilly Media and co-authored by Jeff Siarto (http://www.jeffsiarto.com), Head First Web Design is the latest book in the award winning Head First series.  Head First Web Design is a true user-centered web design book, exploring topics such as pre-production, layout, color theory and color design, information design and architecture, usable navigation design, accessibility design, audience research, and user testing.

The Head First series is best know for using the latest research in cognitive science and learning theory to craft a multi-sensory learning experience.  Head First Web Design continues that tradition by using a visually rich format specifically designed to take advantage of the way the reader’s brain really works.

For more information on the book, including table of contents and sample chapters, visit http://www.headfirstlabs.com/books/hfwd/