[Dspace-general] Making DSpace Your Own at ASIST 2007

[Dorothea Salo]

Hello all,

Apologies for the crossposting and the somewhat late notice -- Tim and
I just found out about this yesterday ourselves!

The third "Making DSpace Your Own" tutorial will be held on Friday
morning, October 19, at ASIST 2007 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United
States (http://www.asis.org/Conferences/AM07/program.html).  This
tutorial will cover basic-to-intermediate customizations of DSpace,
while also including an introduction of Manakin
(http://wiki.dspace.org/Manakin) and using Manakin's Aspects and
Themes to customize it for your institution.

Registration is open for ASIST 2007, and the cost of the conference
and tutorials is posted on the tutorial page:
http://www.asis.org/Conferences/AM07/dspace.html

The official announcement is below.  Please feel free to contact Tim
Donohue (tdonohue at uiuc.edu) or myself (dsalo at library.wisc.edu or
dorothea.salo at gmail.com) if you have any questions.

We hope to see you at ASIST!

--

Starting an institutional or digital repository using DSpace software?
Get control over its look and feel! Learn to modify and customize
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 no knowledge of DSpace or Java.
Familiarity with basic Unix commands, FTP, HTML, and XML recommended,
though not required.

Course 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
    * Introducing Manakin – the XML/XSLT based interface for DSpace 1.5
          * Why has Manakin been chosen to replace JSPs?
    * 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, HTML and XML 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 the benefits and functionality provided by the new Manakin
(XML-based) interface for DSpace, and why it has been chosen to
replace JSPs.

Instructors

Tim Donohue is a Research Programmer at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where he works on IDEALS
(http://ideals.uiuc.edu), the UIUC institutional repository built on
DSpace software. Tim has a background in Java programming and received
his MLS from UIUC in May 2005. He is a DSpace Committer and taught a
similar DSpace Customization tutorial at JCDL 2006 with Dorothea Salo,
then of George Mason University, and another at JCDL 2007 with Scott
Phillips of Texas A&M University.

Dorothea Salo is Digital Repository Librarian for the University of
Wisconsin System's MINDS at UW DSpace repository
(http://minds.wisconsin.edu). She holds two MAs (Spanish and Library
and Information Studies) from the University of Wisconsin at Madison,
and began her career in librarianship at George Mason University,
where she ran the DSpace-based Mason Archival Repository Service
(http://mars.gmu.edu).

-- 
Dorothea Salo                dsalo at library.wisc.edu
Digital Repository Librarian      AIM: mindsatuw
University of Wisconsin
Rm 218, Memorial Library
(608) 262-5493