Wednesday, March 24, 2010

ILLiad PreConference Training - Part 2

Towards the end of this morning's session (remember, it is already 12:45 pm here), we discussed using Pivot tables & charts in regards to the Borrower and Lender Resource Sharing Stats Reports on the OCLC site. I am getting a username and password from JP so I can access these online reports and see what sort of information may be gleaned from them. Anyway, Jon went through some cleanup of the data so that it is usable in Excel and elsewhere. The coolest thing this morning (sorry, Stephanie) was when Jon showed us how to use geocoding to assign geographic coordinates (latitude & longitude) to addresses from our data (ILLiad, OCLC resource sharing, etc.) - any data really. Using a free website, we can use that data to create a map containing all of the addresses. For instance, if we wanted to map which institutions we borrowed from - either borrowed from period or borrowed more than twice (or some other number) - we export our data to an Excel spreadsheet. The only data needed is Institution name, address, city, state, and zip. Some data may need to cleaned up a bit before it can be used, but that's not a huge deal. We copy our data into this website, map our fields, verify our data, and let the website do its thing. After some processing - length of time depends on amount of data, obviously - the map will be displayed. This information can be saved, printed, or shared. I will need to do some experimenting with this site but I believe it will allow us to add the map to a web page of our choosing so people can visually see who we are borrowing from (for example). I think the uses are endless.

This afternoon I will be attending a lab where we will practice manipulating data in Access and Excel using some "dummy" data from Notre Dame. I think it will be an interesting session and will try to write some on it this evening. There is also a social event from 6-8 at the local Aquarium just down the beach from us. Should be fun. Until then...from sunny (but windy) VA beach, VA...

No comments: