This August DIVA will be hosting a number of events to introduce DIVA to new faculty members for the Fall Semester.  These events will provide general DIVA overviews introducing new users to DIVA and introducing some possible use cases. Check the DIVA Workshop Calendar or log into POWER for more information. Here are the dates:

Aug 18, 11-12:30 DIVA Overview HSS 380

Aug 19, 11-12:30 DIVA Overview HSS 380

Aug 21, 9-11:00 DIVA Overview HSS 380

Aug 22, 10-12:00 DIVA Overview HSS 380

This summer DIVA will be presented at a number of conferences. Here's more information about those presentations:



06/28/08: World Congress of Institut International de Sociologie - Budapest, Hungary
The DIVA Team will be presenting a regular session under the title "Archives, Accountability, and Democracy in the Digital Age: Until lions have their own historians: the Digital Information Virtual Archive (DIVA) and the attempt to archive subaltern histories.
http://www.scasss.uu.se/iis/iis2008/index.html

08/09/08: Merlot 8th Annual Conference: Still Blazing the Trail and Meeting New Challenges in the Digital Age - Minneapolis, Minnesota
The DIVA Team will be presenting a regular session on "Reclaiming Campus Digital Treasures Using DIVA".
http://conference.merlot.org/2008/index.html

The DIVA Team is launching summer support sessions in which users can get one-on-one help from our support staff. This is a great opportunity to setup a course in DIVA for the Fall semester, move your course materials from your old static website, learn to use video or prepare slide shows, or maybe just learn if DIVA is right for you. Whether teaching, doing research, or just trying to securely share files with others, DIVA's here to help.
To sign up: email "divateam@sfsu.edu".

We’re always working to expand DIVA and add further functionality. We’ve finished polishing off the new caption feature in DIVA which allows you to add closed-captioning text to any of the videos you upload to DIVA. Below is some information about how create proper captions for DIVA and examples of how that looks. We're in the process of developing a comprehensive guide for you, but if you have any questions feel free to email us at divateam at sfsu.edu.

This is an official notice that due to building maintenance on Sunday, April 27, 2008, DIVA will be temporarily off-line from 8:30am until 3:30pm PDT. We apologize for the inconvenience.

We’re updating the format of our Humanities Workshops. Instead of a large group lecture, you can reserve a private training session with one of the DIVA support staff. There we will address your specific sessions and train you to use the DIVA tools for your specific usage. Each training session will be 30-minutes in length and you can reserve that time by emailing us to let us know you are interested. The dates available are:

We're continuing our DIVA Overview and Help workshops in the Humanities building. They're open to everyone who is interested in effective ways to use DIVA with your course. The next upcoming workshop on Monday, March 17th workshop (New Time! 1:30-3:30pm in HUM 401) will focus on using DIVA with web content from outside, like podcasts, RSS feeds, blogs, and video-logs. We'll provide a definition of these sometimes vague terms as well as ways you can incorporate them into your DIVA courses effectively. If you're interested in showing up to this or any future Humanities workshops, you can drop us a line at divateam@sfsu.edu or just show up at any of the times listed below.

If you have a series of images to present to your class, DIVA's Slideshow tool is a great way to present them. Unlike other slideshow formats, DIVA's slideshows will work on any computer so long as it has an internet browser. I'll walk you through the basic process of setting up a slideshow and give some tips and tricks to using them effectively.

The failed hardware has been replaced. DIVA is back-up to full-speed.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

In addition to our native support of video, we’ve added support for video formats from the websites Youtube, Vimeo, and Google Video in your DIVA Web Documents. This allows access to many offsite video lectures, political speeches, video podcasts, and other streaming video content.

Accessing it is already very similar to adding any other video to a Web Document.  When working on a Web Document, in the Authoring Tools bar click, “Add New Video.” This brings up the typical DIVA interface for adding video except with the new added area “Embed external video”. Here you simply copy and paste either the link to the video or the embed HTML code the site gives you. Click “Save” at top and the video should be added.

As always, if you have any questions about this feature feel free to email them to us and we’ll be sure to answer them.

DIVA has set up several dates throughout the Spring semester where we'll host DIVA Overview and Help workshops in the Humanities building, room HUM 401. Here we'll offer an introduction to DIVA as well as help with applying DIVA's features to your course. Here are the dates and times you can show up:

DIVA Spring 2008

Greetings from the DIVA Team,

First, I’d like to apologize for the silence on the blog front. We’ve been hard at work and I’m sure you’ll hear more about new developments sooner rather than later. Meanwhile, the Spring 2008 semester is in full swing and with it DIVA has more new users than ever. As always, the DIVA Team is more than happy to help get your courses going in DIVA and part of that is the DIVA Workshop Program.

We have three types of workshops that we alternate through during the semester. The first is the DIVA Overview Workshop where we break down DIVA explaining generally uses of the site and the bigger picture of the DIVA project. This is a great introduction for people who don’t know much about DIVA. The next workshop is Teaching With DIVA, which serves as a helpful next step giving you ideas about how to use DIVA effectively. The final workshop, DIVA Hands-On Help, is a 90-minute long workshop is where faculty may actually work on their own DIVA projects with the aid of a DIVA Team member. At these workshops, an instructor from the DIVA team will help answer questions you may have about specific issues with your course and give examples and recommendations on how to best use the DIVA tools in your situation.

We’ve set up a schedule through March with the Spring semester workshop dates. If you’d like to attend, shoot us an email (divateam at sfsu.edu) and let us know to expect you.

DIVA Workshops

DIVA With the College of Humanities

Season's greetings from the DIVA team! Our apologies for things getting a little quiet here on the DIVA blog in the last couple of months. We've been hard at work, and we'll have a brand new version of DIVA (not sure what we'll call it, yet: 1.5? 2.0?) out for you around the beginning of the New Year. Moreover, we expect to have a lot of exciting news to announce in January and throughout the New Year about partnerships, additional collections, feature improvements, and more.

Things are looking brighter than ever for DIVA's future. Stay tuned!

Some great new stuff made its way into DIVA this past week. Our major focuses have been refining/fixing features introduced in DIVA 1.0 at the end of September, and importing some of the great large collections that people are sharing with DIVA and its users:

Organize your course folders.

One of the big limitations of DIVA 1.0 was the limited support for rearranging course folders after you'd created them. This release fixes this. You can reorder your folders by dragging them around (for the time being, the podcast box cannot be reordered; it's always last). And you can move an item from one folder to another by simply dragging it from where it is to where you want it to be.

Ascending/descending sort in file manager.

Previously, clicking a column in the file manager would only sort by that column in ascending order. Now, clicking a column alternates between ascending and descending orders.

Over 30,000 images from the World Image Archive.

We've augmented our initial imports of the CSU World Image Archive with over 30,000 additional images, and will be adding even more soon.

Assorted bug fixes and smaller enhancements.

A more sensible default sort order when browsing, a better look for resource lists, a prettier drag representation, accessibility enhancements, some fixes to the new upload procedure, performance enhancements, and much more.

With our updated workshop schedule for November also comes the introduction of a new workshop to better train you in using DIVA. DIVA Hands-On Help is a 90 minute workshop where faculty may actually work on their own DIVA projects with the aid of a DIVA Team member. At these workshops, an instructor from the DIVA team will help answer questions you may have about specific issues with your course and give examples and recommendations on how to best use the DIVA tools in your situation. This is a great introduction to using DIVA at an intermediate level and it will help to build up your DIVA page and get it ready for using it in your course.

Here are the two dates for this new workshop:
    Nov 8 2:00pm DIVA Hands-On Help
    Nov 14 11:00am DIVA Hands-On Help

To sign-up for a workshop, go to POWER, Academic Technologies online workshop and event scheduling system. Simply select the event date you'd like to attend and sign-up. As an alternative, also feel free to email divateam@sfsu.edu.

New Upload Screen

You may have noticed: The new version of DIVA is live. Along with the normal bug fixes and minor improvements, we've made two big changes that we think you'll love. Don’t worry, change is good and we’re here to help.

The first feature we’d like to introduce is an update to our Upload Files feature. We reworked the system to make it easier and more simplified. You upload the file first and then are taken to a screen where you can give the file a title and description. After this, you can navigate through four tabs to add tags, attach additional related files, choose which courses and web documents to attach the file to, and adjust who has the ability to see it. For more information on this, click here to read our FAQ.

There’s a new course folder feature on DIVA that provides numerous new ways to organize and present your “DIVA web documents”. If you've used DIVA before, you'll recognize DIVA web documents as what were formerly called assignments. You’re no longer limited to creating just assignments in DIVA, and you can now create any sort of document digitally within DIVA to share with your students. The new folder system provides a way to dynamically arrange your DIVA web documents and files. You can drag web documents, pictures, videos, or audio files from clipboard into these spaces and order them using the arrows. The spaces can be organized, renamed, and filled with any sort of web document you might want to share with your users.

Adapted from " thivierr" via Flickr http://flickr.com/photos/thivierr/760264365/ CC

It's almost here! The official first version of DIVA. Of course, the fun won't stop there. We'll keep on fixing things, making them better and adding new features.

Here's what you can expect for the upcoming release:

 * Improved Upload feature (fewer steps, handle multiple uploads in one procedure)
 * Revamped DIVA Web Documents (now Assignments section, integrates slide show feature)
 * Support for Links (as shareable, moveable objects)
 * Many bug fixes or silent enhancements

We recommend new account users take a DIVA Overview workshop to learn more about its features. New workshops will be added throughout the semester. The dates for the month of November have been added.
With November we've added a new workshop format. Think of it as sort of DIVA 201. These new 90 minute workshops are where you'll be working on your own DIVA projects with a member of the DIVA Team on-hand to answer your question and explain techniques to improve your project. This is a great way to get introduced to the intermediate level of DIVA usage. For more information, click here.

We are also happy to schedule special workshops for departments or groups in your local area.

Workshops at HSS 380:

Dates for October
    Oct 1, 2:00pm DIVA Overview
    Oct 10, 11:00am Teaching with DIVA
    Oct 12, 2:00pm DIVA Overview Workshop
    Oct 15, 2:00pm DIVA Overview Workshop
    Oct 26, 10:00am Teaching with DIVA
    Oct 30, 3:00pm DIVA Overview Workshop

NEW November Dates
    Nov 2 1:00pm Teaching With DIVA
    Nov 6 3:00pm DIVA Overview Workshop
    Nov 8 2:00pm DIVA Hands-On Help
    Nov 14 11:00am DIVA Hands-On Help
    Nov 15 2:00pm Teaching With DIVA
    Nov 27 3:00pm DIVA Overview Workshop
    Nov 29 2:00pm Teaching With DIVA

To sign-up for a workshop, go to POWER, Academic Technologies online workshop and event scheduling system. Simply select the event date you'd like to attend and sign-up. As an alternative, also feel free to email divateam@sfsu.edu.

Associate Professor Trevor Getz of the History Department has acquired the African Times and chosen to share this publication with CSU and DIVA network faculty, exclusively in DIVA. The African Times was the only continental African newspaper published in the mid-19th century and provides unique perspectives on not only African but world events from that period.

We'd like to thank San Francisco State University's Center for Teaching and Faculty Development (CTFD) who wrote a very nice article about DIVA for the July issue of their newsletter the Garden. A copy of the article is located below or you can find it at the link below.

http://academic.sfsu.edu/CMS_uploads/files/7faff-279.pdf

DIVA Screen Shot of Podcasting Interface Pod Cast feature sample

The DIVA Team has just added a Podcasting feature to DIVA, located in Course areas. This allows DIVA users to drop-in audio files which can be syndicated out to students or others through RSS or into iTunes.

Give it a try and send over any feedback or suggestions to "divateam@sfsu.edu".

We are happy to announce our continuing Summer Workshop series with new dates for July and August. We've also introduced a new workshop, "Teaching With DIVA", which will focus on using DIVA in the classroom. Starting in Fall, we'll also offer "Research with DIVA" and "Digitizing for DIVA".

Also, DIVA is proud to be part of the SF State New Faculty Orientation program and will offer workshops August 17-21 from 3-4:30-p in HSS 362 which will be open to all.

To sign-up, email divateam@sfsu.edu or use the Academic Technology Power scheduling system (http://power.sfsu.edu).

Location: HSS 380 Computer Lab
7/9: 10a-Noon: Nursing Department DIVA Demonstration
7/11: 2p-3p: Introduction to DIVA Workshop
7/17: 11a-Noon: Introduction to DIVA Workshop
7/26: 11a-Noon: Introduction to DIVA Workshop
7/31: 11a-Noon: Introduction to DIVA Workshop
8/2: 11a-Noon: Teaching with DIVA Workshop
8/8: 11a-Noon: Introduction to DIVA Workshop
8/14: 2p-3p: Teaching with DIVA Workshop

Location: IR Briefing Theater - HSS 362
8/17: 3p-4:30p: New Faculty Orientation Workshop
8/20: 3p-4:30p: New Faculty Orientation Workshop
8/21: 3p-4:30p: New Faculty Orientation Workshop

Updates made to DIVA on Monday, May 14, 2007:

• Slideshows - Slideshows are a new beta feature of DIVA now integrated with courses. Below the assignments area in your course, there is a slideshows area where you can add and reorder your slideshows. We're currently working on tutorial materials for this new feature. See this full post for a few more details.
• File bundle comments - Logged-in users may now comment on file bundles.
• "Used in..." info on file bundles - It's now possible to see where a file bundle is used in the "Used in..." section of a file bundle. The list shows the courses, groups, assignments, blog posts, etc. that reference the file bundle.
• New course and assignment look-and-feel - The course and assignment user interfaces have been updated to be cleaner and more attractive. See below for a few of the major changes related to this item.
• Assignment authoring tools are now located on the right-hand sidebar - This change conserves vertical space, preventing you from having to scroll so much to reach the editing tools and/or content.
• Better image support - DIVA now supports images in a few additional formats, including TIFF in CMYK color space (such as is used by professional printers) and Windows Bitmap format (BMP).
• Tabbed bundle information - Bundle information, such as "What's Related?" and "Contents" is now in a tabbed control, allowing more information to be presented in less space.
• Audio transcoding - Following the improvements to the video transcoding process, DIVA now supports the transcoding of audio files to MP3 format on upload. A wide variety of audio formats are supported, including WAV, MIDI, AAC, and MPEG-4 audio. Other formats may be added in the future, but note that we cannot and will not support conversion of DRM-protected files (such as iTunes Store or MSN Music Store purchases).

These one  hour faculty workshops introduce faculty to the DIVA concept and functions.  Come learn how to use DIVA to manage your digital file, create courses, collaborative working groups and learn how to search the Public Commons area to find digital files that you can use in your courses and research.  All faculty and staff are welcome to attend these workshops!

Dates
Tues May 15, 3:30p-5p
Thurs May 17, 10a-11:30p
Tues June 12, 11am-12pm
Fri June 15, 11am-2pm
Wed June 20, 2pm-3pm
Tue June 26, 2pm-3pm
Wed June 27, 11am -12pm

Location
HSS 380

Facilitators:
Andrew Roderick, Director of BSS Computing


RSVP
divateam@sfsu.edu

DIVA's video file conversion service ("transcoder") has been updated and improved. The transcoder automatically converts supported video files you upload on DIVA into Flash Video (FLV) format for playback on the web. DIVA supports embedding FLV videos directly into assignments and other types of DIVA Web Documents through the use of the "Add Video" authoring tool. The new transcoder version fixes the stability and reliability issues of the previous version of the service and adds support for a broader range of file formats, including:

• Windows Media Player video files (.wmv)
• Various types of QuickTime files (.qt, .mov) - including Sorenson and H.264
  
• Various AVI files (.avi)
• "Raw" Digital Video (.dv)

Due to the success and popularity of our April DIVA Faculty Workshops we have scheduled more dates for the end of April and May.
The one  hour faculty workshops introduce faculty to the DIVA concept and functions.  Come learn how to use DIVA to manage your digital file, create courses, collaborative working groups and learn how to search the Public Commons area to find digital files that you can use in your courses and research.  All faculty and staff are welcome to attend these workshops!

Dates
Tuesday,  Apr 17, 11a-12:30p (HSS 380)
Wednesday,  Apr 18, 2p-3p (HSS 380)
Wednesday, April 25th, 2p - 3:30pm (HUM 403)
Thursday, April 26th, 11am - 12:30p (HUM 401)
Thursday,  May 3, 11a-12:30p (HSS 380)
Monday,  May 7, 2p-3:30p (HSS 380)
Wednesday,  May 9, 11a-12:30p (HSS 380)
Tuesday,  May 15, 3:30-5p (HSS 380)
Thursday,  May 17, 10a-11:30p (HSS 380)

Facilitators:
Andrew Roderick, Director of BSS Computing
Susan Cline, DIVA Support Team

RSVP
divateam@sfsu.edu

CATS 2007 at CSU Fullerton

DIVA will be presenting at CATS 2007 being held at CSU Fullerton March 26-28. The presentation will take place on Tuesday, March 27th at 2:45p in the Bradford Room. We will be talking through an overview of DIVA as a faculty-centric tool supporting faculty teaching and research and also DIVA as a tool support resource and collection management and sharing within a single campus and across multiple campuses.

If you saw us at CATS and want more information, feel free to contact me, Andrew Roderick, directly at:
roderick@sfsu.edu
or
415-338-6116.

We'll be planning a video conference event in April and will also be making some campus visits. Let us know if you'd like to take part in any of these.

The DIVA team will be offering one hour faculty workshops this April to introduce faculty to the DIVA concept and functions.  Come learn how to use DIVA to manage your digital file, create courses, collaborative working groups and learn how to search the Public Commons area to find digital files that you can use in your courses and research.  All faculty and staff are welcome to attend these workshops!

Workshop Dates:
Thurs, Apr. 5  3:30pm
 Mon., Apr. 9, 11am
Tues., Apr. 10, 3:30pm
Wed., Apr. 18, 2pm

Location: HSS 380

Facilitators:
Andrew Roderick - Director of BSS Computing

Susan Cline - DIVA Support Team

RSVP and Questions: divateam@sfsu.edu

Yesterday, we put up a new version of DIVA. This new version is the culmination of about a month of hard work on improving the user interface, usability, and extensibility of DIVA. Take a look around DIVA and you'll see some new features that are designed to make DIVA easier to use and prettier than ever.

• Floating file manager. Inside the clipboard, there's a new option to bring up the file manager over the top of the current page, wherever you are in DIVA. So, for example, if you're editing an assignment and want to add a particular file bundle but don't have it in your clipboard, you can pop open the file manager, locate the desired bundle, and drag it directly onto the targeted area. (This is not currently supported in Safari due to bugs in that browser. These bugs are fixed in the development releases of Safari, so this feature will be available in the future.)
• File bundle rating. Users can now rate file bundles to help provide feedback to uploaders. We'll be experimenting more with this feature in the future and start adding mechanisms for finding the highest rated (and most downloaded) files in the system, with the hope that files with high reusability will become easier to locate. (Commenting will also be added soon, with the hope that it will improve feedback and collaboration.)
  
• Improved bundle details page. The bundle details page (the page you get when you click on a file name) is vastly improved. The new interface allows you to preview images and videos that you're allowed to download; aggregates common tools in one place; and just plain looks better. We'll be making similar improvements to various other parts of DIVA in the near future.
• Improved user interface for sidebar.
• Improved user interface elements on My DIVA and blog pages.
• Retired old "Add New Text" content option in assignments, etc. Content pages (like assignments) formerly offered two distinct content types for "Add New Text" and "Add New Text (with Optional Image)"; the functionality of the former encompasses all of the capabilities of the latter. We've now retired the former to remove this redundancy.
• Bug fixes in representative images. Representative images for your account and courses are now correctly scaled.
• Other bug fixes and improvements. As always, there are a wealth of other smaller bug fixes and improvements in this release, too numerous to mention.

DIVA is Open For Business - 24 hours a day

San Francisco State University faculty interested in learning more about what DIVA can do for them should note, DIVA is now open for business on campus. We are beginning to distribute accounts in February accompanied by one-on-one introductory trainings and group trainings starting March 1st.  Coming soon, our FAQ section will also feature video screencasts showing users how various features can be used.

Contact the DIVA Team to get started with an account and an introduction to its use. 

Email: divateam@sfsu.edu
Phone: 415-405-2195

Screen Shot of the File Manager

We've added a new feature we call the File Manager which now allows DIVA users to manage digital files from throughout your private area in one place. Real handy!  Users can pass files between courses, assignments and groups or add-in files wherever they need from the clipboard. Users can also create private collections of files under My Collections or create Saved Searches of the DIVA File Repository.

Coming soon, we'll add Image Management tools so users can build image collections organized in photo albums.

The DIVA Team wishes all our friends, partners and users a Happy Holiday season and look forward to a great New Year.

2007 will be an exciting year which we plan to start by making DIVA available to faculty across the San Francisco State University campus. We're also working with a number of units there on plans to store collections of digital files that would be available to faculty and in some cases, to the public. Too many other things to list here but check our blog in January for further initiatives.

An Example Group Currently, groups support organizing and sharing DIVA file bundles. You can invite anyone (including non-DIVA users) into your group and allow them to add files into collections.

Today, we released a new version of DIVA that adds support for "groups". The current incarnation of DIVA groups supports simple file sharing and collaboration. You have complete control over the group's access through the "sharing and access control" panel within your group. You can invite other DIVA users (or even people who don' t have a DIVA account) to join your group, to access its files or upload new files within the group.

SSRIC Logo

We want to welcome members of the Social Sciences Research and Instructional Council who are among the first CSU-wide faculty to begin using DIVA.  For those of you continuing to work with DIVA after the workshop held at Humboldt State University 10/07/06, we want you to know where you can get help or provide feedback.

Where to get help?
Susan Cline
scline@sfsu.edu
or
Matt Albert
malbert75@gmail.com
415-405-2195
Specify you need help with Diva when you call.

Where to provide feedback? ("Can it do this?" "I wish it did that."  "This doesn't make sense.")
Andrew Roderick
roderick@sfsu.edu
415-338-6116

You'll notice that the sidebar has a new look and feel. We've simplified it, made it lighter and airier, and added a few new features to boot. One of those new features is the ability to drag the clipboard box around by its title bar. This can come in handy when you're editing a long assignment: if your resource list is at the bottom of the page, just grab the clipboard and drag it down with you as you scroll.

Introducing DIVA Blogging

We're currently working on deploying blogging functionality for DIVA. The DIVA Team Blog is the first example of our new blogging tools and shows a simple group blog. Blog postings in DIVA support all of the great authoring tools of assignments and other content in DIVA, so you have easy access to multimedia features, DIVA bundles, and rich metadata support within your blog.

Keep an eye on this space for future developments!