All articles and portfolio pieces

Flyer News and Campus Report Index
July 02, 2024
Screenshot of the University of Dayton Flyer News and Campus Report Index search interface.

Several years ago, the University of Dayton Archives had MS Access databases created to provide a search interface for staff to query the Flyer News and Campus Report indexes by person, reporter, or subject. While this interface was sufficient for the staff, it did not provide an accessible way for anyone outside of the Archives to research articles, and the interface itself was limited. One of my projects in 2024 was to migrate the databases to MariaDB and develop a publicly available web interface. The information in the index will remain static beyond linking newly digitized articles, so an entire CRUD site was unnecessary.

https://go.udayton.edu/fncr

Erma Bombeck TV Scene
February 13, 2024

As a small portion of the "Beyond the Byline: Erma Bombeck's Story" exhibit in the University of Dayton Roesch Library, I put together a video that runs on a loop in the space (you can see the video in the intro of the exhibit opening YouTube stream). This project was great for expanding my knowledge of DaVinci Resolve and finding a presentation solution for low-resolution clips.

Based on our first test with the low-resolution clips, displaying them full screen on the TV was not ideal. I had the idea to incorporate a retro TV scene to keep the videos smaller but still visually interesting. I created a composite image in GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), which was a successful start, but it was a challenge to find freely available photos that checked all of the boxes.

To have control over the scene, I decided to recreate it in Blender. Using a few reference images for a retro-style television and Erma's typewriter, I modeled everything in the scene except for the flower and vase. Through trial and error, I found lighting, HDRI, and rendering settings that produced a reasonably realistic result. The clips in that portion of the video were on the air in different years, so I created individual renders updating the "On Air" sign appropriately.

This was a ton of fun to put together, and I am pretty happy with the final result. After seeing all of the photos in the exhibit, if I were doing it over, I would replace the image above the TV with something else. I also would have modeled something to replace the flower, possibly putting in a few of Erma's books, centering the TV a little more.

Library of Congress Call Number Game/Training
July 26, 2023
Demonstration of the Call Number game/training showing multiple books on a bookshelf where you must rearrange the books to the correct Library of Congress order.

A colleague has been working to streamline student worker training for Access Services in the University of Dayton Roesch Library. Initially, they sent links to Kent State University and Carnegie Mellon University's training to see if we could do something similar. In Kent State's case, their JavaScript code was homegrown and used SortableJS and CMU built their game using Flash and ruffle.

That following weekend, I put together this little MVP - try it out! The initial version was designed for a large, high-resolution monitor, so it is not a great experience on mobile. Improvements are incoming as we will link to this training/game from Isidore and use it this fall (2023).

This is a JavaScript solution using the Dragula library for the drag 'n drop functionality, a JSON structure for easy modification of the tasks, and template literals to build the books and shelves. At the moment, there is no internal logic to determine the correct order; order is specified by the JSON structure.

Upon completion of the training, the user can input their name and the jsPDF library will generate a basic certificate with a pixel aesthetic. This can be uploaded as part of the training process to confirm the training was completed.

Repo: https://gitlab.com/dabeeler/call_number_training_game

This project was inspired by and took some design cues from the following projects: