Drupal Website Development and Launch

As part of ongoing efforts to modernize Tarlton Law Library’s website and streamline website management workflows, I proposed to move core site content into the Drupal Content Management System.  Setting a Drupal 7 site as the target, I learned Drupal through tutorials, DrupalCamp workshops, and participation in the UT Drupal user community.  After consulting with campus Information Technology Services staff to develop a site migration plan, I coordinated efforts of our software developer and various content managers at the Library to migrate and create new content, and launch a new site just in time for the Fall 2013 semester start.

Digital Asset Management System Implementation

After conducting an asset inventory to gauge the digital asset management needs of Tarlton Law Library, I joined a collaborative team of colleagues across the UT-Austin campus, from the Briscoe Center for American History, the Visual Resources Collection at the School of Architecture, and the Harry Ransom Center.  Our charge was to identify, test and recommend a tool to facilitate the management of digital materials across campus units.  Ultimately, our respective units’ needs were too diverse to share one tool among us, but Tarlton chose to go with OCLC’s CONTENTdm and Digital Archive products.  I co-presented a poster about our working group at the Texas Conference on Digital Libraries in 2012.  Tarlton’s digital collections in CONTENTdm were publicly launched on August 23, 2013.

Texas Constitutions 1824-1876

A digital library of early Texas legal documents originally built via grant-funded projects in 1999 and 2002, this material is consistently a high-traffic section of the Tarlton Law Library website.  In 2010,  I began coordinating a sustained group effort by librarians, archivists, students, and a programmer to evaluate the resource, identify practical fix-it strategies, and forge a more user-friendly and sustainable web resource for scholars, teachers and students interested in Texas legal history.  At the Texas Conference on Digital Libraries, May 2013, I shared the story of our renovation efforts in a presentation titled “Extreme Makeover:  Digital Library Edition.” (slides | handout | press release)

The new site was launched publicly in July 2013.

Making the Most of LibGuides in Law Libraries

LibGuides is a web publishing platform designed for librarians to easily create and manage research guides.  After learning about this tool in a professional development course offered through the American Association of Law Libraries, I proposed and implemented a LibGuides subscription for Tarlton (TarltonGuides).  We’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of it, and with a colleague, I shared our experiences with the law library community:

• March 2012, Article, AALL Spectrum magazine: Making the Most of LibGuides in Law Libraries (with Kasia Solon Cristobal)
• July 2012, Demonstration, Annual Meeting, Boston, MA: Cool Tools Café demonstration of LibGuides
• July 2012, Poster, Annual Meeting, Boston, MA: “Making the Most of LibGuides in Law Libraries” (with Kasia Solon Cristobal)

Other Law Library Projects

Tarlton Library News Blog – A WordPress blog I set up to serve as a content management system for library news and announcements, and which integrates with our other social media channels (@TarltonLawLib on twitter, and Tarlton Law Library on facebook).

Tarlton Law Library community in the UT Digital Repository – I  worked with UT Libraries staff on the launch of a DSpace institutional repository for UT-Austin, and set up collections for the law library.

Tarlton Online Exhibits – I have worked closely with Tarlton’s Special Collections staff to design and standardize the format of the library’s online exhibits.  I built javascript menus for our larger exhibit sites, such as the  Law Dictionary Collection and Aztec and Maya Law: an online exhibit and bibliography, to provide more elegant navigation.

Graduate School Projects

Alive in Truth New Orleans Disaster Oral History and Memory Project – A digital library project my classmates and I developed for local non-profit using Greenstone open source software.

The Mike Wallace Interview with Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr – As part of a class project working with materials from the Harry Ransom Center,  I digitized and transcribed this interview.  The GLIFOS transcription tool we used enabled me to create an interactive, rich media resource with synchronized transcripts and video and a subject index.

Digital Imaging Basics (2005) tutorial

Symantec AntiVirus for the Mac (2005) tutorial

Introduction to PowerPoint (2004) tutorial