Hi! I'm Daniel

My primary responsibility at NC LIVE (North Carolina's library consortium with over 200 member libraries) is managing the main NC LIVE website. Patrons from all across North Carolina can log in and access the full NC LIVE collection as well as resources licensed by their own library. Librarians can get information about resource training opportunities, view their EZproxy configuration, check the status of NC LIVE resources, and learn about NC LIVE's services.

Most of the website is powered by Drupal, but there is also an API that I developed, built off of Laravel. The API ties together several disparate systems that NC LIVE had been using and allows for better data integration. For instance, NC LIVE staff can edit a library's information in Salesforce and immediately see their changes on the website and on the library's EZproxy server.

We redesigned the whole website in 2021-2022. This update included a brand-new graphic design, site data structure changes, and a move from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9.

One of my final projects for Indiana University was a redesign of the IUPUI website. The IUPUI site was exciting because we had the chance to re-engineer all of the templates we had been using for several years. The entire team was building from the ground up to make all of our future websites as flexible as possible.

My task was to build the XSLT templates in Cascade Server to manage all of the new content types we were creating. Each content type (such as a block of text, a slide shows, or a video) had its own module that could be overridden on a site-by-site basis depending on the needs of the client. Discrete content blocks were then put together and arranged by content creators to build each webpage.

The Brevier Legislative Reports are a series of documents chronicling the business of the Indiana General Assembly from 1858 to 1887. The reports are incredibly rare (several volumes having never been published at all), and they provide a rare glimpse into the politics of a turbulent time in American history.

The digitization project was started in an effort to increase access to the reports via an online Internet portal. The markup allows for researchers to search the volumes more effectively and in ways that are not possible with analog media.

This project involved the creation of a small digital library collection as a test of my digitization technique and knowledge of best practices. I wanted to do something personal, so I chose to digitize sixty images my parents had taken while on my grandparents' farm in Payette, Idaho in 1975 and 1976.

The images captured life on the farm: from milking animals to mowing the lawn to playing in the snow. Each 35mm slide was digitized and the resulting image stored in an uncompressed TIFF format. This TIFF file was used to create derivatives for use on the website.

To complement the images I created metadata records for five of the images as a test set using MODS and Dublin Core. I also digitized a journal my grandmother had been keeping at the time into TEI.

Finally, I wrapped all of this together into a simple web portal that allows for browsing and downloading of the images.

The goal for this project is to take advantage of the two main facets of digitization: accessibility and preservation. Prior to the start of this project, the slides were placed in large boxes in a single location in my family's home. By creating a digital access portal for these images, not only can dispersed family members or other interested individuals view the materials, but they are more likely to be preserved as well.

CEWiT is an initiative across Indiana University Bloomington whose goal is to increase women's excitement about technology. A big drive of the initiative is to get women thinking about technology and how pervasive it is in many fields, not just the usual suspects such as Computer Science and Informatics.

My main task for the CEWiT site was the construction of a mini-course repository. This repository allowed our client to pull in course information from Indiana University's central course repository and supplement that data with their own CEWiT-specific information.

This aggregation makes it so that the client does not have to manage all of the data for each course (as that can be managed by an external entity keeping track of IU courses), but they can also attach their own information as well.

The President's Challenge was a government initiative promoting physical fitness for everyone, but especially for youth. The website consisted of three main components: the static website, detailing the various programs offered; an online store; and an online activity tracker where users could log in and record their various physical activities to earn virtual medals.

My responsibilities for this project included doing some of the front-end development, implementation of the static website into a content management system (Cascade Server), and working on the back-end for the activity tracker. I also served as a liaison with the client after the site had been launched.

The IU Cinema provides a place on campus for the showing of a wide range of films, from small indie films to blockbusters, and everything inbetween. Our client wanted a website that would stand out and provide a platform for contextualizing the films and series featured at the new theatre.

The Health Center provides health services for Indiana University students, faculty, and staff. This redesign was undertaken to advertise the Health Center's services and promote a more personal brand message.

For my final project in my metadata course I chose to build a metadata schema for describing works of interactive fiction (IF). These works are fascinating as they combine elements from traditional literature with elements from video games and computer systems.

The metadata about a particular work of IF might have fields familiar to librarians such as author and publish date, but also elements such as control method and perspective.

My metadata schema attempted to meld these elements into a single comprehensive structure. I extended some of the basic elements from Dublin Core elements but also created a number new elements as well. The schema is defined in RDF, as are a set of ten records that I tested it on.

For this project I worked with a group to write a grant proposal for the Boston School Forest. The proposal was for the creation of a digital herbarium to complement the school's analog herbarium. The digital herbarium would house images and metadata for the several hundred species of plants. The images plants will then be accessible from the Boston School Forest website.

I concentrated on writing the technical requirements portion of the proposal, but also was involved with general editing. In addition, I was responsible for creating the wire-frames and mock-ups, to show how the interface for the new system might work.

I wanted to create an interface for browsing my CD and DVD collections for the final project of my XML workshop class. The purpose of the collection would be to have a (theoretical) list of all my music, movies, and video games. Each item in the collection has an associated set of metadata.

The metadata for the different types of media are different based upon the user (i.e., me) and how the library would be used. For instance, a Game has a field for the number of times that I've beaten it; whereas a Movie has a list of the lead actors.

The XML was generated, tagged, and validated against a DTD that I created. I also wrote an XML schema to validate the documents as well, but chose to use the DTD for the sake of simplicity in the final iteration. Once the XML was finalized, I wrote XSLT to produce a simple webpage. The entire project was completed within about a week (hence the ridiculous design) and incompleteness of the list.

My final assignment for the AJAX workshop was a mash-up project for tracking an artist’s concerts around the world. The user would be able to select a few criteria--such as the dates, state, and the maximum amount that they were willing to pay for tickets--and then select if they wanted to see the data in a timeline, on a map, or both.

After the search, the webpage would read in the data (dummy data in JSON format, as though it were generated by a database) and display the concerts that met those criteria.

Each concert matching the criteria was displayed on the table on the left-hand side of the screen, which listed the date, time and the name of the venue. The concerts pinned on the map could be clicked for additional information, such as the ticket price, city, state, and three links that were dynamically generated that would search for hotels in that city. Finally, the concerts were all present on timeline, as we had trouble filtering through the XML sourced timeline data.

The Epic Ride project was to be an interface for sharing information about biking trails. Information about particular trails or circuits would be provided by users and stored in a flat XML file. Users could then capture videos of riding the paths and share them with the community, with competitions to see who would complete the circuit most quickly, or who could capture the most beautiful scenery, and so forth.

One hiccup in the project was that I had trouble getting Flex to display the .mpg encoded videos supplied by my brother. Because of this, combined with the short-time frame of the course, I only had the time to implement placeholder videos of motor racing.

The whole interface is more practice at using MXML for layout than anything, as it many elements are for placement only.

This final project of the Perl workshop was a word hunting program. The user enters a block of text into a field and a target word in a separate field. The program then checks to make sure that the string is not too long and does some pattern matching to make sure that the input was a word.

The program then runs through the block of text and singles out the word when it appears. The program also keeps track of the number of times that the word has occurred, and does a small amount of styling (by adding bold tags around the word) when it is found.

While it is a relatively simple program to do conceptually, I found it useful to gain the experience using GET and POST to pass the data from one page to the next.