[Dspace-general] DSpace Tutorial at JCDL 2006

[Tim Donohue]

Hello all!

I wanted to announce a DSpace tutorial that Dorothea Salo and I are 
presenting at the upcoming JCDL 2006 at the University of North Carolina 
(June 11-15). The tutorial is titled "Making DSpace Your Own" and will 
take place from 9:00am-12:30pm on Sunday, June 11. We will be 
concentrating on helping those of you newer to DSpace get a better grasp 
on configuring and customizing DSpace for your own institutions.

Registration for JCDL is now open on the JCDL 2006 Website 
(http://www.jcdl2006.org). There's also a brief online description of 
this tutorial available at: 
http://jcdl2006.org/program/making-dspace-your-own/

A more detailed description of the tutorial follows this email.

If anyone has any questions, feel free to forward them our way! We will 
be attempting to make any slides for this tutorial available after JCDL, 
but we'd encourage you to join us in person if you can!

Tim Donohue (tdonohue at uiuc.edu)
and
Dorothea Salo (dsalo at gmu.edu)



=========================================
Tutorial: Making DSpace Your Own

Abstract:
Starting an institutional repository on top of DSpace? Using 
BioMedCentral's new OpenRepository service? Get control over its look 
and feel! Learn to modify DSpace to reflect your institution's branding, 
and improve usability for both submitters and users. Learn some of the 
basics to making your DSpace installation unique with customized code or 
functionality. While you’re at it, learn about the DSpace developer 
community and how you can give back.

This introductory tutorial assumes little to no knowledge of DSpace or 
Java. Familiarity with basic Unix commands, FTP, and HTML recommended.

General Outline:
- Why customize DSpace?
- Before you start: precautions
- Where DSpace code lives
- Making easier changes
- to page text (Messages.properties)
- to look-and-feel (CSS)
- to the configuration (dspace.cfg)
- to submission forms (input-forms.xml)
- Introducing the DSpace developer community
- Why contribute to DSpace?
- DSpace Patch submission guidelines
- Applying an existing patch
- Editing a JSP in DSpace – looking at basic Java logic
- Questions & Answers

Target audience: Librarians and staff planning or running DSpace 
installations who want more control over the technology. Introductory to 
intermediate-level. Basic Unix, FTP, and HTML familiarity useful, though 
not required. No Java, JSP, or CSS knowledge assumed.

Learning objectives:
- Understand and justify spending effort on DSpace customization
- Protect against breaking DSpace during customization
- Understand which parts of DSpace are easily changed and which aren't
- Know where to go to modify specific aspects of a DSpace installation
- Know how to make changes live on the server
- Understand why the DSpace community is important, and how to give back
- Learn where to go for more information or help when customizing DSpace
- Learn the basic structure of JSPs in DSpace
- Learn how to apply custom DSpace patches to your local DSpace 
installation

Presenter bios:

Dorothea Salo is the Digital Repository Services Librarian at George 
Mason University; she runs Mason Archival Repository Service 
(http://mars.gmu.edu/), GMU's DSpace installation. Her background 
includes work with text markup languages, electronic publishing and 
ebooks, and accessible web design. Despite knowing nothing about Java or 
DSpace previously, she completed a visual redesign of MARS within two 
months of her start at GMU, and is now actively working on DSpace 
patches to improve the platform's accessibility and usability.

Tim Donohue is a Research Programmer at the University of Illinois at 
Urbana-Champaign, where he works on the Illinois Digital Environment for 
Access to Learning and Scholarship (IDEALS - 
http://www.ideals.uiuc.edu/). IDEALS is the UIUC institutional 
repository, built on DSpace and scheduled for wide release in Fall 2006. 
Tim has a background in Java programming (among other languages) and, 
before receiving an MLS from UIUC in May 2005, was a technical architect 
for a Chicago-based consulting firm. He is an active member in the 
DSpace developer community: submitting patches, reporting bugs, and 
helping to answer questions on the various listservs.

-- 

========================================
Tim Donohue
Research Programmer, Illinois Digital Environment for
Access to Learning and Scholarship (IDEALS)
52 Grainger Engineering Library
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

email: tdonohue at uiuc.edu
web:   www.ideals.uiuc.edu
phone: (217) 244-7809
fax:   (217) 244-7764
========================================