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Working with Chicago Data (part 1)

We are still talking a lot of data at North Park – in particular Chicago data. So I’m going to start getting my hands dirty working with this data to build capacity for future partnerships with faculty and students. So here is the first in what I hope to be many installments of the “Working with Chicago Data” series.

Mapping Chicago’s Grocery Stores

First step: Download data from the Chicago Data Portal (https://data.cityofchicago.org/). I’m using the Grocery Store 2013 dataset for this example.

Grocery Stores – 2013

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The data itself seems pretty clean and well formatted. I’m going to use Tableau for this example because that’s the tool I’m learning right now. I opened Tableau and imported the spreadsheet from the Chicago Data Portal. I ended up creating 4 different visualizations based on this data.

The first is a map of grocery store locations. It uses the latitude and longitude from the dataset to create points. Pretty standard and vanilla.

These next map is much more interesting. It takes into account the size of the store (measured in square footage) and codes that as size and color. Larger stores have larger, darker circles.

The last two maps were just variations on the second map. One version filtered out “small stores” that were less than 10,000 square feet. The other filtered out stores with the work “liquor” in the title. On a technical levels, these filters were easy to apply. However, I’m completely aware of the cultural assumptions I’m bringing to bear here. When I (white, affluent, middle class) think about a grocery store I think about a large store that doesn’t have the word “liquor” in the title.

That’s that! It was pretty easy to get this data and put it to use in the form of a map. I used Tableau here but I could also use Excel (with the power map add) or a more specialized tool like ArcGIS.

In terms of next steps or extensions:

  1. It would be interesting to compare results using a different tool. Might be good to showcase the basic steps for using each tool.
  2. It would be very interesting to add neighborhood boundaries and/or other information such as demographic information and/or economic status. I’ll have to look at ways to incorporate this data.
  3. It would also be very interesting to combine this data with user feedback like Yelp reviews.
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Roadmap to Library Publishing

First, I’ve determined that there is no one “roadmap” that will lead my library into digital publishing. So, instead of creating a map, I’m going to do the best I can to sketch out the terrain ahead and think about questions that can guide our path.

Broader Context

This section tries to address two main questions: What is happening in the world of scholarly publishing that is relevant to North Park? What is happening within the North Park setting that is relevant to a library published endeavor? Quick thoughts:

  • Continued movement toward Open Access. There is still work to be done in our local context but that is the clear movement. The Covenant Quarterly and Journal of Hip Hop Studies indicate this trend is taking root on campus.
  • Institutional branding. There is a renewed focus in institutional branding and online presence. There could be powerful connections to make here.
  • Publishing and the North Park mission. My sense is that North Park values diverse contributions to the academic community more than creating a specialized repository
  • Chicago. There might be some opportunities to promote North Park within the regional context through research and student projects.

Scope

We need to define the scope of this project. There are many different efforts that fall under the broad category of “digital publishing”, including:

  • Institutional Repositories
  • Digital Humanities
  • Data Repository
  • Open Educational Resources
  • Campus multimedia (lectures, performances, etc.)

Of these options, I think the most appropriate level and scope would be an institutional repository that contains simple/static documents such as PDFs. A next step would be to curate multimedia from across campus.

Even within this scope, the library will need to make editorial and collection development decisions to make sure that (1) we have a critical mass of content and (2) that there is some editorial scope. I think we should prioritize the following content areas and focus on building relationships with relevant parties.

Student Research

  • Honor’s Projects and Papers
  • Student Research
  • Master’s Thesis
  • NPPress Student Research
  • Covenant History Papers
  • Partnerships with different courses/programs.

Faculty/Staff Scholarship

  • Journal Articles
  • Faculty/Staff Presentations and other “gray” literature
  • Papers from campus symposiums
  • Offer hosting/support for existing campus projects

Political Realities/Soft Skills

We would need some strong support from across campus to take on this project and lead the campus here. Given the proposed scope of this project, here are the people I think it would be important to connect with:

  • The President
  • Provost
  • Campus Deans
  • The University Marketing and Communication Office
  • Honors Program
  • Seminary Faculty
  • Faculty/Tenure Committee
  • NPPRESS Leadership
  • Student Research Committee

Some of these needed connections blend into the next set of questions that seeks to define the scope of this project and effort. I think if we have 5 strong allies (willing to contribute the content they are responsible for) that would make a strong starting point.

Management

Do we have the technical and social workflows to produce, distribute and preserve this content? There are many overlapping questions here, but here is an attempt to list the important ones:

  • Do we have the rights/permissions to publish these materials? Who will work with each group to determine these permissions and who will maintain the paperwork?
  • Do we have the staff expertise, staff time, and faculty/staff connections to successfully manage this projects?
  • What is the ongoing cost of this project in terms of hosting costs, incentives and open access fees, etc.?
  • Where does this rank compared to other library/institutional priorities?
  • What are peer institutions doing? What can we learn from them?
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Review: “Library-as-Publisher: Capacity Building for the Library Publishing Subfield”

I’ve been tasked with creating a “Roadmap to Digital Publishing” for the Brandel Library. I’ll post the draft of the “roadmap” I develop later on, but right now I’m in the research phase of the project and wanted to document the sources I’m reading. I could include this as a bibliography in the other post, but this is happening chronologically first and I thought it would be pretty interesting to document. So here is goes!

Library-as-Publisher: Capacity Building for the Library Publishing Subfield

Katherine Skinner, Sarah Lippincott, Julie Speer, Tyler Walters
Volume 17, Issue 2: Education and Training for 21st Century Publishers, Spring 2014 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0017.207

Although this article focused more on the professional developement needs of library staff to take on publishing activities, it also provided a very good overview and definition of the library publishing efforts and section on “Core Knowledge and Skills for 21st Century Publishers” could provide a helpful guide.

Definitions

This article borrows the following definition from the “Library Publishing Coalition” (http://librarypublishing.org/about-us) that defines library publishing as:

the set of activities led by college and university libraries to support the creation, dissemination, and curation of scholarly, creative, and/or educational works.

This relatively basic definition seems like a good shared starting point and distinguishing library publishing form other forms of digital humanities work.

Knowledge and Skills

The list of core knowledge and skills identified in this article proved to be very helpful as well. Here is a summary of that section – with my summarizing comments in the form of questions:

  1. Scholarly Publishing Context – what is happening in the world of academic publishing?
  2. Academic Context – why is the role of the library within the larger institution? to publish something unique? enhance the institutional brand?
  3. Soft Skills – who do you need to build relationships with? What political connections need to be forged?
  4. Business Planning and Management – what is your business plan? who is your audience?
  5. Technology and Workflows for Production, Distribution, and Preservation – do you have the technology and workflow to publish (and care for) everything you want to publish? For text, audiovisual, datasets, interactive things, etc.
  6. Editorial and Acquisitions – can you get and edit the stuff you want to publish?

Overall, this was a very helpful article. The two sections I’ve highlighted were particularly relevant – even as I read the article from an “institutional roadmap” when the original article was written in terms of professional skills and development. The Notes section as provided to be quick valuable in highlighting other relevant sources and authorities.

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I LEAD U – Planning for Success

This year, I’m taking part of an exciting program sponsored by the Illinois State Library Association called I-LEAD U. This stands for “Innovative Librarians Explore, Apply, and Discover” and I’m excited to be a part of it!

Truthfully, I’m not sure what this program will entail and involve, but I’m excited about it and plan on blogging my way through the whole experience. Starting now – with this video they suggested we watch before our March meeting.

[youtube id=”XXMx9qNGI7k”]

Project Planning

The history of project planning – mostly a post WWII innovation designed to address modern concerns of accountability and efficiency.

What is a project? “A temporary endeavor, with a defined beginning, middle, and end, undertaken to meet clearly articulated goals and objectives.” Good projects are iterative – continually going back to look again at the problem and think creatively about the solutions. “A project is typically constrained by time, staff, technology, funding, deliverables, or all of these factors.” – These aren’t necessarily bad things – rather just the facts of life. Ultimately, limitations are what make projects interesting. Just take them into account when planning.

Basic Project Planning

The part of the presentation seemed to stress that project planning is an organic process. Step 1 is obviously the beginning and step 5 the conclusion; steps 2-4 are in a dynamic relationship with each other. Projects could move between these points for quite some time before reaching their close.

  1. Initiation/Conceptualization
    1. What’s the big idea? What’s the problem?
    2. Give the concept room to grow and change.
  2. Planning and Design
    1. This is the heart of the matter.
    2. What needs to be done?
    3. What skills do we need to do it?
  3. Executing/Production/Implementation
    1. May be natural – may be surprising!
    2. Be flexible.
  4. Monitoring/Controlling/Adjusting
    1. Observe, Discuss, and Adapt!
  5. Closing/Termination
    1. What was the goal?
    2. How did we do?

What is success? This should be one of the first questions – and one that continually refined and asked again. Here are some basic questions: is it on time? is it within budget? does it work? does the community approve? Let it be good enough!

You are not going to fail.

I LEAD I is designed to support risks and big success! “Risk is the difference between the expected and realized value of the result(s) of a future event.” Risk is about uncertainty – not danger. Risk is a difference  – not positive or negative. No need to avoid risk – just understand and control the difference between the expected and realized value. Where is the risk in the project – in concepts, technology, communications, and/or delivery? Who owns the risk – the project team, the user, a third party

Review

Overall, I thought this was a good video full of interesting content. It wasn’t exactly exciting or revolutionary – but it did apply terms of a conceptional framework to ideas that I had only loosely grasped. I think having a formal structure and a shared vocabulary – like this presentation provided – will be a helpful part of the I LEAD U experience with many applications to other parts of the library.

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Getting Started with Archon, part 2

Accomplishment time! In North Park’s Archon project, I’ve…

However, as always, there are some next steps in this process:

  1. First, I need to “flatten” the structure of the collection content. Some of the hierarchy “series, subseries, box, folder, item” wasn’t very helpful and made for a very disjointed view from the user’s end. I can make these changes by editing the master CSV document and deleting the subseries for most of the records – selectively moving the descriptive data into the title field of the boxes.
  2. Make sure the collections all have the full title; including “papers”, “collection”, “records”, etc.
  3. Add the language of the material based on the collection content
  4. Add the “Preferred Citation” to the material
  5. Move the processor from the “Finding Aid Author” field to the “Processing Information” field.

The next-next steps (that will directly involve the Archivist) will include:

  1. Creating scope and abstract statements for the collection and shortening the arrangement statements.
  2. Applying Library of Congress Subject Headings.
  3. Determine name authority conventions and create creator records for the collection.