Code4libBC Day 1: Lightning Talks

Lightning talks from the first day of Code4libBC.

Provincial Digital Library Update (Daniel Sifton/Caroline Daniels)

Looking at what others have done
* DPLA: gave presentation at code4lib portland about old system. New system based on PostgreSQL, Solr, Ruby-driven…
* testing with VM using vagrant, ansible, elasticsearch, solr, ruby, rail console
* Supplejack: 2nd generation platform, Harvest OAI/etc., Apache-based manager, Working, API connected to Solr and MongoDB
* more during breakout

Building Quick and Dirty Library Tools with Google Apps Script (Terry Brady)

  • Google Apps Script: server-side JS, access to Google’s API, run as Auth’ed user
  • can package as Chrome extension/plugin
  • available to where users are, sharable via Google Drive, script has configurable authorization (run as user vs. author)
  • CVS files can be corrupted when shared between users, especially with autocorrect in excel/google spreadsheet
  • basic web service where can upload CVS, make sure auto-correction is turned off, and uploaded to google drive
  • can do lots of things especially using triggers, such as time or event based triggers
  • can package as plugin into Chrome store

Makerspaces and the Maker Community in the Lower Mainland (Maryann Kempthorne)

  • Vancouver Maker Foundation organizes Mini MakerFaire at PNE in June
  • Surrey Public Library: Maker Meetups
  • want to make sure libraries are involved in the movement
  • VanMakerEd: meets 4 times a year; VPL usually hosts one per year
  • 3D Maker Meetup at Richmond PL
  • MakerSpace Fraser Valley joint programming with FVRL
  • Vancouver HackSpace
  • MakerLab (Strathcona)
  • training for teachers and others
  • Island: makerspace at Camosun, Greater Victorial PL, Nanaimo, Gibsons
  • my addition: ladies learning code for teachers

Web Analytics with Piwik (Jonathan Schatz)

Slides
* alternative web analytics (instead of Google Analytics)
* free, self-host, LAMP stack, FOSS, modules, privacy focused
* data control, friendly defaults with sensitive private, honours donottrack
* minimizing data collected: anonymized IPs, set retention periods, offer opt-out, TLS
* standard metrics: visits, pageviews, bounce rate, visit & action, scopes, custom dimentions for reports and segments
* simple custom variable tally: example: keep track of which organization downloaded files from repository
* transition: visualize where traffic is coming from and where it goes out
* calls can be done using client-side, server-side; similar to GA
* goals/conversions: example: downloaded more than 3 items, watched a tutorial, referred by email; will then display metric x goal
* data quality: piwik spamlist updated by community and can be customized
* overall: strong privacy, mix of metrics, some config (can chock on high traffic, so might need to throttle number of writes), graphics aren’t great, but information can be exported
* good API: can build on top to pull reports and widgitized in other apps
* SFU doing some work on using API to bring in analytics into Islandora

Break time

red panda

TechBC Memory Project metadata upgrade (Holly Hendrigan)

  • interviews 30 people that were part of the TechBC university (that no longer existed)
  • uploaded audio files to Summit (IR) with minimal metadata
  • oral history conundrum: transcription expensive, meaning lost when transcribed to text, but without transcription, will unlikely be used
  • OHMS: oral history metadata synchronizer: interview summarized, segments can be summarized and given keywords
  • SFU developer refractored viewer to work in Islandora
  • site has basic browsersable pages, then metadata searchable, viewer has audio viewer, metadata tab, and transcript in PDF format
  • lessons learned: too big a job for a single person to do
  • oral history now accessible

Making Data Human: Visualizations using the Open Collections API (Schuyler Lindberg)

  • goal: create visualizations to understand the data
  • based on aggregation queries in ElasticSearch
  • have pretty much full access to EleasticSearch functions with UBC OpenCollections API
  • can neat aggregations to do data over time, and other cool things, assisted by use of filters
  • also used for faceting in the UI such as list and count of subjects
  • JSON is now necessarily optimal data format, but can be converted to tabular data
  • can create visualizations using tools such as d3
  • scripting language built-in so can do very refined comparisons
  • used internally to identify bad metadata, example: 2 ‘still image’

Getting Things Done (Cynthia Ng)

I wrote up my presentation as usual, so please go see the blog post with the full slides and script.

Lunch Time

First lunch, then breakout sessions time!
chibibis with okonomiyaki

Author: Cynthia

Technologist, Librarian, Metadata and Technical Services expert, Educator, Mentor, Web Developer, UXer, Accessibility Advocate, Documentarian

Leave a Comment

Please log in using one of these methods to post your comment:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: