Attending OSCON in San Jose, CA

I will be attending OSCON in San Jose, CA from July 20 to 24. If anybody is also attending or lives in the area and is interested in setting up an MDID Birds of a Feather session, please comment below or email mdid@jmu.edu.

Mid-Atlantic Chapter meeting report

The VRA Mid-Atlantic Chapter met at James Madison University, Harrisonburg VA on Friday, May 29, 2009. The meeting report is now available.

Automatically generated thumbnails

Generating thumbnails from full-size images has been a weakness of MDID 2. Often the thumbnails ended up being pixelated, especially for line drawings and certain kind of photographs.

MDID 3 uses a different image processing library (PIL, Python Imaging Library) that produces much better results. I just created these samples for comparison:





The left thumbnails are saved at 80% quality, the ones on the right at 95% (and twice the file size), but both appear to be of reasonable detail and quality.

VRA Mid-Atlantic Chapter meeting at JMU

The VRA Mid-Atlantic Chapter will meet at James Madison University, Harrisonburg VA on Friday, May 29, 2009.

This day-long chapter event "Engaging in New Technologies," facilitated by staff from the JMU Center for Instructional Technology, will introduce members to several tools that can be used by visual resources professionals to promote their services and create an online presence for their Visual Resources Centers. Hands on experience with tools such as Google forms/sites/groups, Blogger, Twitter and Flip cameras will be the focus of the day.

And we are offering a door prize – a free Flip Camera will be given away at the end of the workshop!

The meeting will be held in at the beautiful new East Campus Library at the Center for Instructional Technology. Parking is close by. There will be a catered lunch, along with hands-on workshops held in the morning and afternoon. The schedule for the day is:

9:30-10:00 a.m. Registration/coffee

10:00-12:30 p.m. Workshops

12:30-1:30 p.m. Lunch/Chapter business meeting

1:30-4:00 p.m. Workshops and wrap-up

The workshops will be free for Chapter members, VRA members who are not Mid-Atlantic Chapter members will pay $15 and receive the benefits of a Chapter membership; non VRA members will be charged $20; there will be a $15 charge for lunch for all attendees. We welcome you to invite colleagues who might be interested in the program. Please be sure to RSVP (see below)!

Our hosts at JMU have set up a Google Site with the plans for the day, which includes the agenda, a survey for attendees to fill out before the workshop, picture of the flip cam door prize, directions to JMU with map to parking lot and the east campus library, etc.: https://sites.google.com/site/vramidatlantic/Home

For those of you who may be considering staying overnight either Thursday or Friday here is the link to local lodging and dining facilities: http://www.jmu.edu/parents/accommodations.shtml

Please RSVP to Chapter Chair, Macie Hall: macie.hall@jhu.edu or 410-516-6165 by 5 PM (EDT) on Wednesday May 20.

New content on demo site

The MDID 3 demo site has new content to match the images available on the older MDID 2 demo site.

At this point the only available functionality is a preview for the new explore feature. More features will be added to the demo as development progresses.Please note that in order to see any content, you have to log in using "demo" as both the username and password.

Since this is still an early version, you may run into bugs - please feel free to post comments in reply to this post, but hold off on reporting them via email (unless it sets your computer on fire or something of similar magnitude).

Edit 04/16: A login and password is no longer required.

MDID 3 Beta Test Sign-Up

We have received multiple offers from institutions to help out with the MDID 3 Beta Test later this year. To better be able to keep track of all interested people we set up a simple sign-up form here.

We will notify anybody who signed up once we are ready to start beta testing MDID 3.

Development contract awarded

JMU has awarded a contract to TapHere! Technology, LLC from Haymarket, VA for software development services to create connectors between MDID and other services including ARTstor, Flickr, PowerPoint, and Blackboard.

This work is funded by an IMLS grant titled "Making Connections: Linking MDID to Other Digital Image Systems and Tools."