IL 2010: Dashboards, Data, and Decisions

[I took notes on paper because my netbook power cord was in my checked bag that SFO briefly lost on the way here. This is an edited transfer to electronic.]

presenter: Joseph Baisano

Dashboards pull information together and make it visible in one place. They need to be simple, built on existing data, but expandable.

Baisano is at SUNY Stonybrook, and they opted to go with Microsoft SharePoint 2010 to create their dashboards. The content can be made visible and editable through user permissions. Right now, their data connections include their catalog, proxy server, JCR, ERMS, and web statistics, and they are looking into using the API to pull license information from their ERMS.

In the future, they hope to use APIs from sources that provide them (Google Analytics, their ERMS, etc.) to create mashups and more on-the-fly graphs. They’re also looking at an open source alternative to SharePoint called Pentaho, which already has many of the plugins they want and comes in free and paid support flavors.

presenter: Cindi Trainor

[Trainor had significant technical difficulties with her Mac and the projector, which resulted in only 10 minutes of a slightly muddled presentation, but she had some great ideas for visualizations to share, so here’s as much as I captured of them.]

Graphs often tell us what we already know, so look at it from a different angle to learn something new. Gapminder plots data in three dimensions – comparing two components of each set over time using bubble graphs. Excel can do bubble graphs as well, but with some limitations.

In her example, Trainor showed reference transactions along the x-axis, the gate count along the y-axis, and the size of the circle represented the number of circulation transactions. Each bubble represented a campus library and each graph was for the year’s totals. By doing this, she was able to suss out some interesting trends and quirks to investigate that were hidden in the traditional line graphs.

a response to rewarding conference speakers

As I was sitting in a CIL2009 session that was essentially something that could have easily been a blog post with a bunch of annotated links, I wondered to myself why this was chosen to be a session over something else, and why I had chosen to attend it rather than something else. I concluded that sometimes I need to have something whack me upside the head to “get it,” and a good presentation is often the best tool to do it.

Kathryn Greenhill writes, “I suspect it’s not that I *know* it all, but that I know how to find out at point of need and that I am more likely to use my human networks than to look back at conference notes or handouts to find out.” I rely heavily on my human networks, both in person and online, to keep me informed of the things I need to know — much more so than professional literature and formal presentations. However, sometimes even those things can spark an idea or clarify something that was previously muddy in my mind. I’m happy to reap the benefits of shared information, regardless of what format is used to deliver it.

That’s all fine and good for me, someone who is only moderately on the side of information creator and more on the side of information consumer, but what about those “shovers and makers” out there who are generating new ideas and, well, shoving and making in libraryland? Greenhill notes that she has “found much, much more value hanging about talking to other presenters than in attending the formal sessions,” and she suggests that rather than cheesy speakers’ gifts, they could instead be given “something to stimulate the presenters’ brains and challenge them.”

I like the idea of this, but I also worry that it has the potential to widen the gap between creators and consumers. I benefit greatly from being able to listen in on the discussions between the speakers in LobbyCon/CarpetCon settings. And, even when I am in sessions that challenge my skill set, I am motivated to expand that skill set, or at the very least, I know more about what I don’t know. I’d rather have that than continue in ignorance.

Greenhill, along with Cindi Trainor and John Blyberg, spent many hours during Computers in Libraries secluded away while crafting The Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians manifesto. The end result is available to us, but I wonder how much more we consumers would have learned by being able to listen in on the process of its creation? Isn’t that part of what the unconference movement is about?

CIL 2009: ERM… What Do You Do With All That Data, Anyway?

This is the session that I co-presented with Cindi Trainor (Eastern Kentucky University). The slides don’t convey all of the points we were trying to make, so I’ve also included a cleaned-up version of those notes.

  1. Title
  2. In 2004, the Digital Library Federation (DLF) Electronic Resources Management Initiative (ERMI) published their report on the electronic resource management needs of libraries, and provided some guidelines for what data needed to be collected in future systems and how that data might be organized. The report identifies over 340 data elements, ranging from acquisitions to access to assessment.

    Libraries that have implemented commercial electronic resource management systems (ERMS) have spent many staff hours entering data from old storage systems, or recording those data for the first time, and few, if any, have filled out each data element listed in the report. But that is reasonable, since not every resource will have relevant data attached to it that would need to be captured in an ERMS.

    However, since most libraries do not have an infinite number of staff to focus on this level of data entry, the emphasis should instead be placed upon capturing data that is neccessary for managing the resources as well as information that will enhance the user experience.

  3. On the staff side, ERM data is useful for: upcoming renewal notifications, generating collection development reports that explain cost-per-use, based on publisher-provided use statistics and library-maintained, acquisitions data, managing trials, noting Electronic ILL & Reserves rights, and tracking the uptime & downtime of resources.
  4. Most libraries already have access management systems (link resolvers, A-Z lists, Marc records).
  5. User issues have shifted from the multiple copy problem to a “which copy?” problem. Users have multiple points of access, including: journal packages (JSTOR, Muse); A&I databases, with and without FT (which constitute e-resources in themselves); Library website (particularly “Electronic Resources” or “Databases” lists); OPAC; A-Z List (typically populated by an OpenURL link resolver); Google/gScholar; article/paper references/footnotes; course reserves; course management systems (Blackboard, Moodle, WebCT, Angel,Sakai); citation management software (RefWorks, EndNote, Zotero); LibGuides / course guides; bookmarks
  6. Users want…
  7. Google
  8. Worlds collide! What elements from the DLF ERM spec could enhance the user experience, and how? Information inside an ERMS can enhance access management systems or discovery: subject categorization within the ERM that would group similar resources and allow them to be presented alongside the resource that someone is using; using statuses to group & display items, such as a trialset within the ERM to automatically populate a page of new resources or an RSS feed to make it easy for the library to group and publicize even 30 day trial. ERMS’s need to do a better job of helping to manage the resource lifecycle by being built to track resources through that lifecycle so that discovery is updated by extension because resources are managed well, increasing uptime and availability and decreasing the time from identification above potential new resource to accessibility of that resource to our users
  9. How about turning ERM data into a discovery tool? Information about accessibility of resources to reference management systems like Endnote, RefWorks, or Zotero, and key pieces of information related to using those individual resources with same, could at least enable more sophisticated use of those resources if not increased discovery.

    (You’ve got your ERM in my discovery interface! No, you got your discovery interface in my ERM! Er… guess that doesn’t quite translate.)

  10. Flickr Mosaic: Phyllotaxy (cc:by-nc-sa); Librarians-Haunted-Love (cc:by-nc-sa); Square Peg (cc:by-nc-sa); The Burden of Thought (cc:by-nc)

things you don’t know about me



Here are seven things you might not know about me:


Betty Dickie
Brent Hoard
Cindi Trainor
Dani in NC
Kris Anne Swartley
Mary Carmen Chimato
Mike Kapper

CiL 2008: Woepac to Wowpac


Speaker: Roy Tennant




Speaker: Kate Sheehan






Speaker: Cindi Trainor




*Trainor’s scoring system as described in paragraph three.

Speaker: John Blyberg





