Wednesday, May 28, 2014

DSpace Development at Longsight

I've been a DSpace Developer at Ohio State University for about 5 years, and recently I have changed jobs to work at Longsight, a Registered Service Provider for DSpace. They also have a few other stacks that they support, such as Sakai LMS, and LAMP, such as Drupal and Wordpress. Basically it revolves around solving problems for higher ed, using open source software. They provide hosting, training, consultation, and custom development. So far I've been on a few consultation-setup-hosting-training-development adventures in my time with Longsight, and its fun.

Peter Dietz
+
DSpace
=

Longsight


One thing I really enjoy at Longsight is that there are always problems to solve, and it becomes my job to come up with a creative way to solve the problem. Also, I feel like I score bonus points when the solution that works for a client, can also be contributed upstream into the next release DSpace, to be benefit everyone. Additionally, I get to meet with clients, sometimes over the phone, other times in person, and there is also meeting people at conferences. This year, I'll be in Helsinki Finland for Open Repositories 2014, come say hi. I'll be presenting on the REST API for DSpace. I'm also taking a bit of a traveling/working/holiday across parts of Scandinavia, you can be "at work", anywhere with internet.


Anyways, I have a number of development projects that I've been working on.
  • better Request-Restricted-Item workflow, adding a helpdesk workflow, with buttons to contact the requester, and author of the work.
  • Mime-Type-Icons for content without thumbnails
  • Document Viewer 
  • Displaying Thumbnails of Restricted Content, instead of showing a broken-image 
  • Statistics converter between SOLR to ElasticSearch
  • Customizing, and extending Mirage2 XMLUI theme, and making custom-branded derivative themes, to match each clients design palette.

Not to sound like a sales pitch, but, if you need DSpace Hosting, or DSpace custom development, keep Longsight in mind, we do good work, have fair prices, and we love contributing our work back upstream to improve the DSpace community. Plus, it will give me some fun work to do.