Created during my years as a Master's student at Drexel University's iSchool, I now maintain the blog to post reflections on my information seeking and organizing projects as a librarian loose in the world.
As an amateur birder and interpretive nature guide, I like to include information about the most common and the special birds we can see on my tours in Vieques. When I started studying the local birds a bit more I was surprised to find out that our group of herons range in size from 12 inches to 45 inches give or take a few.
It inspired me to create an info graphic comparing those birds to an "average" height person of 5'6" (66 inches). I collected the height information for the birds from the book Aves de Puerto Rico by Biaggi, published in 1970, and from the Cornell Institute's All About Birds page.
I then took some source photographs (off the Internet) and put them into Inkscape (the open source version of Illustrator) and I silhouetted them by drawing an outline, creating a path from the outline and then filling in the path with black. From there I created a chart, first using Open Office's Write program and overlayed the silhouettes on the chart's bars, proportionally re-sizing them by eye to the appropriate dimensions. I did fact check with my local FWS office regarding how the measuring of birds is done in field guides (from their feet to the crown of their head).
Afterwards I recreated the chart in Inkscape again so that the whole thing could be re-sized to whichever dimensions were needed without the image becoming pixelated (I saved it as a vector file: .SVG-plain so that it could be imported into Illustrator by another graphic designer).
After three days of reading forum posts about the OpenOffice Base program I finally figured out the correct syntax for a query to select and manipulate information based on a specific date range.
Base is the free, open source version of MS Office's Access.
Thank you, bhilton for asking your question and all the volunteers for helping her to reach the answer.
The code that I was trying to write:
SELECT "Listing", COUNT("Nights") AS TotalReservation, SUM( "Nights" ) AS TotalNightsSold, AVG( "Nights" ) AS AvgNightsPerRes FROM "Reservations" WHERE "Date" BETWEEN '2014-01-01' AND '2014-12-31' GROUP BY "Listing"
To make a table which grouped info by vacation house rental and showed me the total number of reservations in 2014, the total number of nights booked in 2014, the average number of nights per reservation.
With more data (and really, who doesn't like data?), I could find out the average number of people per reservation and which geographical locations provide the most/least bookings.
This sort of info would be handy in creating projections for future reservations, focusing marketing efforts on types of groups (family vs. 20 somethings traveling together), and focusing marketing efforts on locations (such as either marketing heavily on the east coast to tap into existing infrastructure, or moving into new market areas to expand.
And finally, thank you Drexel professor, whose name I don't remember at this moment, for being such a punk about us perfecting our SQL in the database class. It came in handy.
Back in July, my son and I saw this really great episode of SciGirls called Frog Whisperers (#301) (it's embedded at the bottom) where the girls learned various techniques to recall a frog's song and match it to the species. One technique was to look at a visual representation of the call, or its waveform. I'm a visual learner, so it was cool see that.
Fast forward to September and the Vieques National Wildlife Refuge gave a talk titled Anfibios y Reptiles, where among other species, they talked about the three species of coquis that we have in Vieques (out of a total of 17 found in Puerto Rico). The biologist presenting the charla was able to whistle the sounds of the frogs and toads, but I wanted something more permanent for recall purposes.
Below, you'll find my notes for the segment on the coquies in a garbled mix of Spanish and English, along with audio recordings which I found at CoquiPR.com and the waveform for each, which I produced from screenshots of the imported audio files using the open source audio editor Audacity.
Three Species of Coqui in Vieques
1) Coqui Comun- the largest of the three at approximately 1.4", it's named for its call, co-KI
This is what it's call looks like:
Here's what the coqui comun sounds like:
(audio courtesy LJ Villanueva-Rivera under a Creative Commons Reconocimiento-NoComercial-Compartir Igual License. See his article on the Common Coqui for more information.)
2) Coqui Churri- almost half the size of the coqui comun at .76" and makes a ki-ki-ki sound as well as a chu-RI, the wave forms of which look like:
Here's what the Churri sounds like (a common coqui can be heard in the back ground):
(audio courtesy LJ Villanueva-Rivera under a Creative Commons Reconocimiento-NoComercial-Compartir Igual License. See his article on the Churi Coqui for more information.)
3) Coqui Pitito- the smallest of the three found in Vieques. It is .6" and is recognized by two curves on its back that look like a pair of parenthesis.
It's call is the least punctuated, but the most constant, kind of a p-riiiiiiiiii. No clue if this waveform represents one coqui, or several overlapping calls made by more than one frog:
And it sounds like:
(audio courtesy LJ Villanueva-Rivera under a Creative Commons Reconocimiento-NoComercial-Compartir Igual License. See his article on the Pitito Coqui for more information.)
So there you have it, three ways- verbal description, visual waveform and audio file- to learn how to distinguish a few fauna of Vieques. A good information professional can help you to find and create all three information sources!
Enjoy the SciGirls video.
(minute 5:32 if you want to jump straight to the part of the sound waves).
I want to go camping. I do not want to have to figure out where x,y,z campsite is located, as I do not have a mental map as of yet of all of PR. So I created a google map. Blue is beach campsite; green is forest campsite. Click on any marker to get reservation info. Yeah, yeah, some of it is in Spanish and I didn't translate, but you'll need to know Spanish if you contact some of the offices to take out a permit for various campsites (specifically DRNA sites). This does not (as of yet) include private campsites.
Audio (CD/MP3) Dancing the Drum by Luis Cepeda Bombazo by Grupo Afro Boriqua
Books: Bomba que rumba : memorias del Primer Simposio sobre la Bomba y la Rumba, Sala - Teatro Beckett
Author:Marlene Duprey Colón
Publisher:Hato Rey, Puerto Rico : Publicaciones Puertorriqueñas, Inc, [2012
Available at Interamerican Metro
La bomba : la música de Puerto Rico : raíces y evolución
Author:William Cepeda
Available at Interamerican Metro (also a DVD, Music CD and book)
A bailar mi bomba
Author:Awilda Sterling; Rafael L López Valdés; Paco López; Carlos Díaz, (Artist); Annette Tolentino; All authors
Publisher:San Juan, P.R. : Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 2010.
Series:ICePé.cómic, no. 11
El baile de bomba en Guayama y Arroyo
Author:Eduardo J Calderón Cordero
Publisher:2013.
At the Interamericana
Article: The bomba and plena : Africa retained in music and dance of Puerto Rico.
Author:Hector Vega
Edition/Format: Article : EnglishView all editions and formats
Publication:Caribe. v. 7, no. 1 & 2, 1983, p. 42-43. illus
Dance and belonging : transformation of rituals in Puerto Rican music and dance forms.
Author:Alma Concepcion
Edition/Format: Article : English
Publication:Journal for the anthropological study of human movement, v. 14, no. 4 (2007)
Website
Puerto Rico Folkloric Dance of Texas http://www.prfdance.org/
The great thing about being an information professional is that I can write a post on just about anything and say it is in the realm of what I do. This post is about games and is inspired by the board game Blokus that my six year old and I are playing. The box has all these little labels for winning a ton of awards and so here are the list of resources for people wanting authoritative sources for recommendations on games and toys.
By the way, Blokus is a great game that is colorful, strategic, funny and fast play. If your young child must always win, two person play practically guarantees that it will always end in a draw. When your child is ready to handle losing gracefully, add more players for harder play!
I got approval to build the catalog for a small non-profit! Yay! The web developer for the non-profit gave me a subdomain to do all my fun, which means that I can install plugins to my heart's content and explore what is best.
I'm building out a few other pages, such as bibliographies and galleries of their content. Which meant that I needed access to the backend of their main domain to discover their content because the website is an organizational mess.
I'm using WordPress and the Web Librarian plugin for catalog creation. I'm using WorldCat for the bibliographical information of text items. After I've imported a lot of records, I need to see what the search capabilities are and whether there is an ability to create a thesaurus. At the moment, I'm not sure there is- certainly a list of keywords/subject in alphabetical order, but a thesaurus with relationships, which is key to discovery, that's what I think is missing within the features and so the question will be whether I can create something.
Maybe create a form using custom post types of:
Keyword
definition
RT
NT
BT
and then somehow tie them to the catalog entry form...
I contract with an excursion company that does not have a physical address; Instead, we have a mobile office. But for one of our excursions we do consistently meet in the same spot, however, my boss tells me that guests are always confused by it, so, she asked me to create a map.
I read this great article on one illustrator's map designing process. Then I searched through quite a few tutorials (ex. http://inkscapetutorials.org/?s=pen) and youtube videos on the open source alternative to Adobe Illustrator. I also got to learn about the open source map data provider Open Street Map. All in all this was a fun, simple project to learn how to use the software and build a map that will hopefully help clear our guests doubts about where to go for their tour.
I'm still awaiting approval, we'll perhaps change some of the colors and text, but this is the general idea.
You never know where inspiration will strike. I wanted to make a sign to alert people about the things they could recycle in the town where I live in Puerto Rico and at first I was just going to make a list. Then I had two thoughts, writing the same information in two languages is tedious; and, what if the person "reading" the sign doesn't read English/Spanish anyway? (We have visitors from all over the world.)
So I decided to make a sign using pictures. Over five hours later and with the input of a few people, I got this:
This is with "borrowing" images from the internet. Imagine if I'd had to create the icons from scratch. I'm not a designer and I'm not planning on selling this- just wanted to make a neat and attractive graphic that I could print on a label and slap on a bin.
I used the GIMP software (open source Photoshop alternative) to create the image file. The project file has 14 layers. Upon reflection, I should have probably made it in Scribus (open source InDesign alternative.) Oh well. I still have the original project file, so I could import the individual images should the desire strike me.
I consulted several YouTube videos and the online GIMP documentation to do all sorts of things like creating diagonal lines, making vertical text and using keyboard shortcuts. Personally, I think the rinse to avoid bugs instructions is fairly genius.
Doing some research on the Wikimedia Foundation and I came across this really rad project called wikiGraph that a student of the Hackbright Academy created to visually demonstrate how a person can go from one subject to another, totally seemingly unrelated, subject. Not as unrelated after all.
The about page has links to a detailed discussion of the tech behind the magic. I have some learning to do! But this is kinda like a reading map for encyclopedia articles, though not curated.
Note: this mashup uses structured information from Wikipedia extracted by the DBpedia community.
I want to learn what it takes to be able to search a collection based on things like creator name and format or the language of the resource.
I want to create a thesaurus of terms with lists of preferred terms and broader terms and I want to see how to bend technology that is accessible to all to create this hierarchical list so that a person can browse through the thesaurus.
In short, I'd like to see if WordPress can actually make a catalog. There are some hints along the way such as the plugins WebLibrarian and Custom Post Type UI. But I'm wondering if I can use the plugin to add the content (in my case, a list of resources with their associated metadata that is searchable) and I'm wondering if I can create the thesaurus, let people search/browse through the thesaurus to find the term they are looking for, or to discover all the terms that could mean more or less the same thing and then find everything in the collection based on that term. How do the two interact with each other technology wise... in WordPress?
I submitted a proposal... just waiting to hear back if the non-profit I want to do this for will allow me to mad genius up their website.
I'm putting together my website (finally!) and there's tons of opportunities to provide more information about some of the things I'm talking about. But rather than reinvent the wheel, I'm going to use all the wonderful content already present out in the world.
If you are new to the concepts of Cataloging and Indexing and need a quick description in layman's terms, Spencer Jardin, Coordinator of Library Instruction at Eli M. Oboler Library at Idaho State University, put together this simple yet informative slideshare:
If you are further into your information professional role and need reminders of professional points, the American Library Association has a wiki entry titled Cataloging and Classification and a fact sheet on Cataloging Tools.
So yesterday my boss says to me, "Necesito cuadrar cuantas millas y cuanto tiempo para hacer una excursion en bici:
saliendo de la Ceiba,
para la Laguna Kiani,
dando la vuelta por los bunkers,
bajando a las ruinas del central Playa Grande,
regresando a la costa norte,
pasando por Rompeolas
y terminando en la Ceiba."
So I swapped in my clipless pedals, put fresh batteries in my Garmin GPSmap 62 unit and went for a ride. As it turns out, for a 14 mile ride that was totally fun, hit all the great spots and was fairly moderate with only one toughie hill that was toward the end. Two hours later I plug my Garmin into my computer, spend some time puzzling through the instructions at GPSVisualizer (not because they are hard, just because it was my first time and I was learning some new terminology) and at the end of the day, I created this:
After all that work, I deserve a treat. Like chocolate! Next step is to add pictures! But I'm going to do that tomorrow.
