I’m at an event in Birmingham, and have a nasty cold, so I’m messing around in my room with my camera. Here’s the view:
HDR Birmingham
EPrints UK User Group Meeting Report
The Winter 2015 EPrints UK User Group Meeting was hosted by ULCC and was my first EPrints User Group Meeting with my EPrints Community Lead hat on. The programme, organised by David McElroy, was published on the EPrints UK User Group Google group.
This was my first public outing wearing my new hats:
- EPrints Services Business Relationship Manager
- EPrints Community Lead
What struck me most about the event was the evident health of the EPrints community. The free tickets to the event were snapped up in a matter of days; on the day, the room was happily bustling with delegates from all over the UK; the presentations were varied and interesting; and a good crowd met for drinks after the event.
As well as a short presentation introducing myself and the Community Lead role, I had also been tasked with presenting the EPrints Development Roadmap to the community. The presentations are available on youtube (roadmap presentation at 2:34:07).
To end the event, I chaired a feedback session where we talked about what the community would like to see, and I invited people to email me directly after the session with further feedback. Here’s what was received:
- EPrints Development
- Drag & Drop file upload
- Click-editable metadata fields
- Thread-awareness in EPrints v4
- Metadata extraction and workflow auto-population (perhaps from DOIs)
- Improvements for Visual Arts items (further development of Kultur work)
- Better infrastructure for dealing with duplicate records
- Generic metadata schemas for Research Data Repositories
- Other Request
- Technical Training Sessions (currently, EPrints Services routinely offers administrator training)
- Technical Webinars
- Regular updates from EPrints
Open Repositories Twitter Trends
I attended the Open Repositories 2014 conference last week, and harvested the conference twitter hashtag using an EPrints repository with the Tweepository package installed. During the conference I generated wordles which I tweeted (the tweepository package makes that a two-click process). These proved to be quite popular, so I thought I’d archive them here. Anyone interested in the trends of the conference can do a comparison. Here they are with their original tweet texts:
Helsinki
I’m in Helsinki for a conference, and I’ve been walking around, taking some pictures. Here are five of them.
White Faced Saki
I haven’t been out with my camera lately, but I did get a nice shot of a White Faced Sake at Marwell Zoo. I had a play with my black-and-white processing software, and then with the colour processing software. Here are the results for the same photograph. I thought the black-and-white one was best at first, but the colour one is winning me over.
Marwell Portraits
On Noah’s birthday, we bought season tickets to Marwell Zoo, and we’ve been making good use of the tickets ever since. I’ve also been playing (again) with black-and-white processing, just for fun 🙂 Here are some animal portraits.
The Black Eagles
The Korean Air Force flight display team, the Black Eagles, performed over Expo Park in Daejeon to commemorate 20 years since Expo ’93. The display was spectacular, and challenging to photograph.
Jinjang at Sunset
I spent the weekend at my mother-in-law’s house, way out in the countryside of Korea, in the village of Jinjang. The weather was so hot that we spent most of the daytime just lounging around the house and avoiding the sun. In the evening, I went out to take photos with the tripod I got for my birthday. I also tried my hand at HDR photography for the first time, and I’m quite pleased with the result.
Details of Old Sarum
A year ago, we got English Heritage family membership, which paid for a years’ entry to a large number of castles and other historical sites over England. We got our money’s worth, but won’t be renewing — we’ve seen all the castles we can conveniently get to. However, the membership was about to end, so we used that as an excuse to visit nearby Old Sarum.
I’ve posted about Old Sarum before, and visited so many times that it was hard to get excited about photographing it, so I experimented with highlighting details of the castle rather than the whole castle itself.
Bluebells
Spring is here. I drove the kids to school one morning (it’s a 25 minute drive through the countryside) and was dazzled by the bluebells, so stopped to take a few pictures.
