Thing 10.5: Networking Tools Follow-Up

[Time for a bit of housekeeping. For Thing 10, Task 2, I posted a tweet referring to an assignment in a completely different MOOC. Below is the content of the "explanatory Doc" referred to in a subsequent tweet, in case it becomes uncoupled.]
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I figured it was unfair to tweet a “teaser,” so here’s the follow up. While pursuing Rudaí 23, I’m also enrolled in “Dazzling Data Visualization,” a free MOOC offered by the U.S. National Network of Libraries of Medicine, Southeastern/Atlantic Regional Office. For that class, I had to create a visualization based on a public data set. Living in the boondocks and being a liaison to some clinical departments on campus, I was drawn to the opportunity to visualize a large data set about federally designated “Medically Underserved Areas.” What follows is partly edited from the context I provided for my classmates, who get to critique my visualization.

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I wanted a simple data set that would be accessible when visualized, so it was necessary to reduce the sprawling original set to less than 1,000 data points. (Tableau Public counts “marks” in legends as well as in the data itself.) Most of the measures used to determine Medically Underserved Area (MUA) status were incompletely populated, so I abandoned those criteria as a focus for the visualization. After much fumbling, I realized Tableau could handle minor civil divisions as “cities.” And so I decided to follow the guideline (invented by me) of “Visualize what you know,” and focused on the three rural states of northern New England.

Hoping that consistency would make for better comparisons, I used filters to get:

Designation Type of Medically Underserved Area and Medically Underserved Area - Governor's Exception

Designated status with no Break in Designation

Medically Underserved Area/Population (MUA/P) Component Geographic Type Description of Minor Civil Division

Common State Name of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.

This retrieved a manageable set of 221 records.

I discovered that Minor Civil Division Name lacked some values, and turned to Medically Underserved Area/Population (MUA/P) Component Geographic Name. This still made for a lot of work. First, my current home state of Maine has a lot of minor civil divisions needing special handling in Tableau. For Maine's "unorganized territories" (and one Native American reservation) I even had to resort to using the GeoNames server to find coordinates, and then a USGS converter to transform them into decimal format. Second, there are some names in common between states. I suspect this is what accounts for some of my missing values, but a) I couldn’t figure out how to fix the problem and b) 4 missing values do not change what I eventually discovered.

With all the missing data, I wasn’t even sure what to focus upon in the visualization. So I started with something easy: the 2 different types of MUAs. Bingo! The raw data is not sorted by state, concealing what turned out to be a striking pattern: for some (unknown) reason, most of Maine’s MUAs earn their status “by the numbers.” Adjacent New Hampshire, on the other hand, requests MUA designation in the majority of cases.

To make the map as accessible as possible, I used both color and shape to identify designation status. The colors are Tableau's suggestion for color blindness. (They check out on the Coblis color blindness simulator.)

In theory, there are ways of overlapping legends to create the illusion of 1 legend capturing color and shape. In theory, there are ways of using IF statements to conceal tooltip display of a variable with a null value (e.g., Infant Mortality Rate, for many of the MUAs on the map). I tried to follow the directions on assorted blogs and guides and Tableau help screens, I failed, and after several hours, I had to cut my losses and present something decidedly less than ideal. That’s my visualization story, and I’m sticking to it!

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The final product my classmates will critique is here if you’re curious.

Thing 9: Reflective Practice (Visual Communicator Things, Option 2)

My task for this Thing is to reflect on Thing 3, an overview of image banks, Thing 7, an exercise in creating a small online exhibit, and Thing 8, gaining some experience in making an infographic. What an experience of extremes these last two were!

Completing Thing 3 was not an "extreme" activity, but still informative. I've used multiple image banks before (Flickr, Google Images, Noun Project, and Pixabay) when searching for just the right image to use, professionally (promotional posters and blurbs) and personally (mostly Christmas cards). Instead of focusing on the act of searching for an image, I chose to examine image tagging, as this determines what one can retrieve from a collection. I cannot tell whether my observations of Pixabay--finding that the visual representation of "entrepreneur" is narrowly defined--reflect an editorial voice, a type of groupthink on the part of Pixabay users who mark images with "Like" or "Favorite," or something else. Regardless, the experience makes clear that it’s essential to try multiple image banks when searching for representation of a type of person or a personal attribute. (And ideally, we users should create and add images that broaden the pool of options available for the next searcher.)

Thing 7 started out uncomfortably and the experience never improved. I couldn’t find any on-site collections appropriate for an exhibit and settled on re-working a handout—not the best of options. What I created was an unremarkable website comprised of a couple of pages. The whole experience was slow and tedious, even painful. Browsing through a multitude of themes--each with multiple possible variants--and "trying them out" holds absolutely no appeal for me. (I’m lucky that I’ve never had to select paint colors for a room, as I would run out of patience rapidly.) Trying to keep on schedule for Rudaí 23 added additional pressure. I grew fatigued, made mistakes, got frustrated, and made still more mistakes. CSS is a weakness of mine, and trying to revise the template to create the visual features I wanted gave me a headache. (When you have a brain injury, as I do, you can literally think too hard.) While I am not sold on using Blogger to create an online exhibit, the Thing wasn’t a complete exercise in futility. Since I feel more comfortable modifying templates, I have removed gadget clutter from this blog and added items I prefer to highlight. Other platforms listed in the original Thing post (WordPress and Omeka) might be more user-friendly, and I’d be willing to try them during a less stressful time of the academic year. At the job, however, I work in a department committed to LibGuides, and I am required to stick with that platform for anything I create in my role as a subject liaison librarian.

Fortunately, Thing 8 yielded considerably more reward for effort. The most challenging part of the activity was selecting a topic to portray via an infographic (so many options, so little time). There are a couple of reasons why this activity “clicked” with me. First, Piktochart presents a limited number of templates for each option (infographic, presentation, or “printable”), so it’s less of a cognitive load to browse the site. Second, the program steers users towards creating “blocks”--modular content that speeds the design of an infographic skeleton. Blocks can actually make for more flexibility in design--I used slides 1-4 and 8 of “Education Basic,” a presentation template(!) for something that is not a series of slides. Finally, I had the benefit of previous exposure to Piktochart via a webinar, and prior attendance at a library conference session on graphic design. I knew the key was to incorporate plenty of white space, minimal text, and just a few strong graphics. Looking back, I might have pared my content even more by removing the numbered blocks and reducing visual clutter in one block that contains three separate images. Because I found the execution of this Thing relatively painless, and the results look so professional, I will see if I can find opportunities to create more infographics (or other Piktochart items) in the future.

Statistics indicate that people from far-flung places (the Middle East and Asia as well as Europe and North America) have taken a look at my blog. I hope this post and others provide some useful information to readers, as well as a peek into the professional life and continuing education of an academic librarian.

Thing 8: Infographics

Reflections and infographic

This is the second infographic I have ever created (the first being a summary sheet in front of my annual report). The creation process was delightfully painless.

The Rudaí 23 blog post hinted that Piktochart provides a more modular experience than Canva. Using LibGuides at work makes me appreciate modularity. Another selling point was the opportunity to make progress beyond my initial exposure to the service, which came in the form of a much too fast and overly detailed live webinar. (Before immersing yourself in the recording, note that the presenter assumes viewers have access to either a dual monitor arrangement or a large screen monitor. If you use a standard size single monitor and you're not already familiar with Piktochart, you'll probably need to pause the video frequently or even replay parts to keep up with the "hands-on" that works better as a demonstration.)

I drew inspiration from two sources. We are in the process of hiring a librarian and our starting salary attracts (or at least doesn't drive off) brand-new graduates to interviews. I also follow a student on Twitter who attends my former graduate program. Both experiences are a good reminder that what is unsurprising after a few years in the same workplace is not at all routine for a newcomer. The infographic is about that ever-present aspect of a librarian's work: "other duties as assigned."

What has surprised me along the "other duties" path? By doing grunt work (sometimes delegation is impossible) I learned that catering services for business clients (i.e., catering refreshments at staff meetings) are breathtakingly expensive. (This also explains, in part, the costs of professional conferences--which in turn explains why our professional organizations seek sponsorship from commercial publishers for conferences.) As an academic librarian, I didn't expect to work with middle and high school students, but have done so many times to support various community outreach activities.

For the purely visual aspects of the infographic, once again I used a color scheme from my institutional branding toolbox. (If you're searching for a similar guide, also try looking for the "graphic identity" or "visual identity" of the organization.) This time I opted for Cabin font rather than Arial. I've since read a blog post noting that "Cabin is tight in the vertical," and I have to agree--any text block longer than three lines would have looked cramped.

For accessibility, infographics can be marked up for screen readers, posted as accessible PDFs, linked to a text alternative (transcript, "longdesc" file, etc.), or presented with a text alternative (see How to Make Digital Assets Accessible: Infographics and How to create an accessible infographic). I've opted for the last of those options, the text alternative below.

Click graphic to enlarge (separate window)

Text alternative for "Other Duties as Assigned" infographic

"Other Duties as Assigned": Librarians Off-Desk

If you’re a library school student, you’re looking for a job.

You’ve probably seen advertisements or position descriptions that mention “other duties as assigned.”

But what ARE those other duties? Here’s a sample from the University of Notmaine.

1) Book Reviews. We publish reviews of popular and scholarly books to support other librarians selecting titles for their collections.

2) Campus Badging Initiatives. We designed and oversee a 3-step pathway encouraging students to learn more about information literacy.

3) Cultural Activities. We facilitate student book groups and host a film series, bringing students together to learn more about topics that interest them.

4) K-12 Student Workshops. We collaborate with other departments, presenting library resource workshops to primary and secondary students visiting from all over the state.

5) Research Support Workshops. We teach employee and student researchers about finding grants, increasing scholarly impact, and publishing open access works.

Want to know more about what librarians do?

Talk to us. You might transform a conversation into an internship!

Nancy R. Curtis. October 2017.

Thing 7: Online Exhibitions

A brief search around my workplace for sources of inspiration yielded nothing but a set of guides about art works permanently on display in the library.  Oh no, I thought. Copyright problems!

And so the online exhibit I created for this Thing reworks a legal size single sheet illustrated handout. The original item is meant to provide new undergraduate students an overview of the library, but I think it leans too much toward an employee's view. About a quarter of the page is dedicated to departments (Special Collections and Government Documents) most of our students will never use, and photos bearing no relation to the adjacent content. The text includes undefined jargon like "periodicals" and "depository." Finally, there's information--perhaps included because of campus politics--utterly irrelevant to students. What student cares that we have a "new" (actually a couple of years old) classroom, and that it's shared with another unit on campus? My aim for "Exhibit Thing" was to try to speak more directly to the concerns and interests of students beginning their first semester at my university.

Planning the exhibit moved rapidly once I settled on an item to reinterpret. What I envisioned was a conventional website with few frills; a suite of pages, each briefly addressing one topic. To save time I re-used photographs from my own instructional presentations.

As for the visuals, I wanted a minimalist design that would look good on mobile phones, the devices our students use most often. I took the liberty of using my institutionally mandated branding toolbox as a starting point rather than a final set of rules. Official colors appear in the exhibit, but I expanded the palate slightly beyond white, black, and two shades of blue. Instead of Frutiger or Open Sans (neither one offered by Blogger) I selected Arial as an easy-to-read sans serif font. Since the exhibit is not meant for official distribution, I replaced a mandatory nondiscrimination statement with a placeholder.

I departed significantly from the original by adding a section titled “Eat.” American public university students pay tuition and fees, and many must work to meet these fiscal demands. For some, balancing education and employment means consuming meals (or snacks) while commuting, during class, and of course while studying or completing assignments. My library bans food consumption in most of the building, so I wanted to acknowledge students’ need for nourishment while also upholding our policy.

And then it was time for hands-on and the challenges began to mount. I had a rocky start, many ups and downs, and finally threw up my hands in resignation. First, it took some hunting around to find a technique for creating a redirect page that would serve as a stable homepage for the exhibit. Then the first template I tried seemed to make some of my content pages vanish--they literally didn’t show on the menu. I switched to the Notable template, which temporarily solved the problem...until the next day, when again pages vanished. I finally discovered they were unchecked on the page list, even though I could swear I hadn’t unchecked them after using the Select all option. The List Order function appeared to move pages in one direction only, not permitting full drag and drop. The More... menu on my phone displayed a background the same color as the menu links. “Black” (hex code #000000) text displayed as a low contrast grey instead, forcing me to switch to a dark blue for readability. Drop caps and accent (differently colored first line) effects disappeared when I added images. The only small relief I experienced was discovering that "gadgets" in the template code are labeled by comments, which enabled me to find and remove items a complete HTML coding novice would need to accept (Report Abuse, Search, and the "hamburger" sidebar).

My takeaways from the experience are:

• Use a familiar platform, use an experienced designer/coder, or prepare for a steep learning curve
• Allow plenty of time for creating an online exhibit. 

If you are interested in seeing my previous exhibit work, have a look at two LibGuides I created to complement temporary small display case exhibits about beer and the planet Saturn.

Thing 5: Video Presentations

I'd describe the making of my first Screencast-O-Matic Video as irritating and annoying.

If you've read my first blog post, you know that I have a number of musculoskeletal problems. I use some assistive equipment at work, including a small touchpad mouse. This doesn't make for long, smooth sweeps from one part of a screen to another...which appears to be an unstated best practice for Screencast-O-Matic videos. For me, preparing a higher quality video with this software would also mean finding a different workstation--one with a conventional mouse I can use (briefly!) to maneuver in a larger expanse on a table or desktop.

Here's my final product, which I created on a laptop that has a larger touchpad. It's rough around the edges, but I reached the point at which striving for improvements wasn't worth the investment of time and energy. I opted to omit a soundtrack, as that would require spending a bit more time on transcripts and captions.

[Video (3:38). Title screen: NUR 101 Library Presentation--A Quick Recap (Visuals only). Demonstrates a search of the CINAHL database, starting from the Fogler Library homepage. The presenter clicks on the Databases button and uses an alphabetical index to view part of a long list of library databases. She selects CINAHL with Full Text and clicks CINAHL Headings in the database menu bar. She searches for nurses, finds it as a CINAHL heading, and clicks on the term to display the tree of more specific terms under Nurses. She clicks the term Nurses by Role to reveal more details of the tree, scrolls down and selects Nurse Liaison, then clicks Search Database. She clicks Advanced Search under the search boxes to reach options for limiting the results. She selects 3 checkboxes: English Language, Peer Reviewed, and Research Article. Scrolling down, she selects Nursing from the Journal Subset menu, and All Child from the Age Groups menu. These limits dramatically reduce the number of search results. Some search results link directly to full text. For another, she clicks the Article Linker button under the result, and selects University of Maine as her location. After a moment, Article Linker returns a screen linking to the full text.]

Powtoon looks intriguing (and far less reliant on smooth mouse sweeps), but there's another Thing waiting in the wings.

Thing 4: Communicating Visually

At this point in the Rudaí 23 experience, I should insert a disclaimer. I am not the official voice of my library, which shall remain unnamed. I do not coordinate public relations there, or even serve on our marketing team. I understand there are limits on how I may apply the material presented in this course, and it is not my intent to overstep boundaries and perform tasks assigned to somebody else. No content I post on this blog represents the opinions of my employer. (That should cover me!)

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At my library, I work as a public services and liaison librarian, creating LibGuides and educational materials. Outside of the library, I have been and continue to be a contributing member of professional association committees. In these roles, there may be opportunities to apply some of the course material.

I enjoyed experimenting with PhotoFunia, although I found it easier to use on my workstation than on a phone. A number of the templates are visually “busy,” best combined with simpler images. Libraries or other entities with strong visual brands could certainly take advantage of these options. (I do wonder if the Wyoming State Library’s Mudflap Girl image would still be effective in the “cup of latte” template.)

For fun, I tried applying a yellow and red “watercolor” (actually “watercolour”) modification to a tempting sight captured at my local farmers’ market.

The results don’t do much for the tomatoes, except perhaps permitting them to masquerade as small blurry potatoes instead. But the colors are certainly eye-catching.

I also tried my hand at creating a Quik video. No doubt, this one will keep viewers glued to their seats.

[Title: The Library is Your Seat of Knowledge. Color photographs of different types of library seating, with zoom effects inserted by the Quik software. (0:45)]

Editing on the phone was quick but not always intuitive. Help screens are linked under the settings icon, but I generally prefer reading text on a larger screen. While pulling together another video I realized Quik constructs default title screens based on the metadata of the photographs--in that case, “An afternoon in (the town where I shot the photos).”

Being a librarian in the USA, I need to consider the accessibility of library resources and services. I’m not sure how Quik clips play for a person with impaired vision. Would a phone voice the text, is it necessary to add descriptive audio, or are there are better means of conveying the visual information?

Thing 3: Image Banks

One reason I enrolled in this program is to learn more about tools for promoting library services and resources. Last year, some of my colleagues and I designed a portal intended to support small businesses and entrepreneurs. We think they will benefit from our content, and we want to increase site visits.

Selecting images to represent abstract concepts is challenging. For the concept of “business,” for example, should we focus on people or on products and services? What image best represents an entrepreneur or small business owner? How do we capture the broad range of businesses in the state? Is our current image, a (presumably urban) skyscraper, the best choice for a largely rural state? Would a rotating gallery of images address these questions?

Enough musing. Time to complete the Thing.

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I searched for “entrepreneur” in Pixabay, limiting results to photos with a horizontal orientation, and retrieved 127 results. Scrolling through, I saw a few problems. I would describe many of the images as “hip white dude.”

There are some examples depicting racial and ethnic diversity...

...or women.

It’s clear, however, that in Pixabay’s universe, an entrepreneur is generally young and works in a contemporary office setting. Given Maine’s demographics and economy, those images pass over much of our potential audience. I had to scroll to the bottom of the first screen of results to find a choice of images I felt would be more appropriate.

Call it entrepreneurship without the entrepreneur.