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Channel: Robin Camille Davis – Emerging Tech in Libraries
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Site icons

I just made a whole bunch of new icons for our website using the Flat Design Icon sets #1 and #2 from Pixeden. They’re free, royalty-free, and attribution-optional. Each set of 16 icons (including...

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Technical details pages

In the past few years, I have noticed an excellent trend among digital projects: the detailed tech specs page. The spirit of transparency and sharing has moved some project teams to show off their...

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Device and browser testing tools

If you’re impatient, like me, you might agree that the worst part of making an online resource is testing the interface across devices and browsers. The golden rule that I tout is that all websites I...

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New toy: Raspberry Pi

So, first, let me just say that this toy is new only in that it is newly in my possession. I know I’m behind the game by quite a while. When my software engineer dad excitedly told me he’d gotten on...

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Making a Superfish menu faster by removing animation

I’m posting this because none of the other solutions I found through googling fixed our problem. Context: Superfish is a Drupal module for your nav menu that shows submenus on hover. Also, I don’t...

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Algorithms and academic research

Last Friday, I attended Computers and Crowds: Unexpected Authors and Their Impact on Scholarly Research at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, an excellent event organized by the LACUNY Emerging...

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Generating red link links for Wikipedia

On Global Women Wikipedia Write-In Day, I was extremely impressed with user Dsp13′s lists of red links — lists of notable women that hadn’t yet been written about on Wikipedia. I used that page as a...

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Librarify it! Considering Raspberry Pi and Arduino projects

Recently, I’ve been struggling to come up with a project to pursue using my Raspberry Pi and/or Arduino (assembled at an NYC Resistor class over the weekend). Because I’m quite the tyro and need a lot...

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Other redesigned LibGuides: VCU, UMich, Stanford

I’ve previously posted on the 70 lines of CSS I used to upgrade the look of John Jay’s LibGuides. They look better, but still not super great — still very LibGuidesy. We had migrated the John Jay...

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Raspberry Pi + Twitter

I made a Twitter account for my Pi, @welbegone. I set it up using a super-simple Pi + Twitter tutorial featuring the Python library Tweepy. So far, it has only tweeted processor temperatures and light...

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Python + BeautifulSoup + Twitter + Raspberry Pi

In my ongoing experiments with my Raspberry Pi, I’ve been looking for small ways it can be useful for the library. I’ve been controlling my Pi remotely using SSH in Terminal (tutorial — though you’ll...

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What did I do this year?

I’ve mentioned before that I keep a professional journal as a quick way to keep tabs on the projects I’m doing and what I should be focusing on. It takes the form of a 3-part note in Evernote: Done,...

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Gentle SEO reminders

I know this dead horse has been beaten. But here are some reminders about things that slip through the cracks. Every once in a while, google the name and alternate names of your organization and check...

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Introducing myself to MALLET

Backstory In my text mining class at GSLIS, we had a lot of ground to cover. It was easy enough to jump into Oracle SQL Developer and Data Miner and plug into the Oracle database that had been set up...

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Implementing a simple reference desk logger

Hi readers! I just got back from a wonderful month at the Folger for Early Modern Digital Agendas. Some blog posts resulting from that program are coming soon, but in the meantime, here’s something...

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(Re)thinking what I do as an emerging tech librarian

I get asked often what it is I do, exactly, and I still don’t have my elevator pitch down pat. I usually choose to view that as a good thing, because I value the freedom to explore new territories and...

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Using Instagram for your library

Update November 6, 2013: We’re on a pretty good posting schedule now: Mugshot Mondays (old-timey mugshots in our collections), Throwback Thursdays (Special Collections photos related to the history of...

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Making a Twitter bot in Python (tutorial)

If there’s one thing this budding computational linguist finds delightful, it’s computers that talk to us. From SmarterChild to horse_ebooks to Beetlejuice, I love the weirdness of machines that seem...

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LibGuides customization tutorial + CSS template

I posted before about the custom CSS I made for John Jay’s libguides. Here’s a more explicit breakdown of how to create and implement your own CSS (although you’re free to use the chunk of code I...

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Google educational materials

As I loitered in our systems manager’s office, I noticed he had a great Google poster up on the wall: It’s kinda old, but the tips still work! I did some googling when I had a minute to find out if...

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The Murder Mystery Challenge: a pilot project with an impressive turnout

This article was originally published in Lloyd Sealy Library’s biannual newsletter, Classified Information, Fall 2013 (PDF). Each fall, the Library offers multiple venues for first-year students to...

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Life With Pi: Microcomputing in Academia

Presentation given December 6, 2013, as part of the CUNY IT Conference held at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Co-presenters and fellow librarians: Allie Verbovetskaya Stephen Zweibel Junior...

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Coming soon: Lloyd Sealy Library Digital Collections

From the 1922 NYPD Annual Report: Narcotics, firearms, and ammunition seized (by NYPD) in raid on headquarters of Hip Sing Tongs (Chinese-American criminal organization). A version of this article was...

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What are emerging tech librarians into this year?

This week, I attended my favorite committee meeting, the LACUNY Emerging Technologies Committee, which I co-chair with Allie Verbovetskaya and Steve Zweibel. We planned out a great semester of...

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Successful social media in our library + using Bit.ly

We’ve upped our social game this academic year since an inspiring LACUNY talk in September 2013. On our library’s Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, we follow a schedule of Mug Shot Mondays and...

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Find a book by call number (bookmark template)

I’ve designed a bookmark for my library to help undergrads find books by call number. It’s a complex concept, so a handheld guide is useful. Our main use case is explaining call numbers to students at...

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Data Viz Hack Day Resources

LACUNY Em Tech Committee: Data Viz Hack Day! February 18, 2014 John Jay College of Criminal Justice Shortlink to this page: bit.ly/emtviz Resources for beginning & intermediate data visualizers:...

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Downloading all the items in an Internet Archive collection using Python

The library where I work and play, Lloyd Sealy Library at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, has had the privilege to have 130+ items scanned and put online by the Internet Archive (thanks METRO!...

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Analyzing EZproxy logs with Python

We use EZproxy to provide off-campus users with access to subscription resources that require a campus-specific login. Every time a user visits an EZproxy-linked page (mostly by clicking on a link in...

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What did I do this year? 2013–14 edition

It’s self-evaluation time again! It’s the second year I’ve had to do this for my current job. Last year, I found it enormously helpful to quantify and visualize the activities I’d done in the given...

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CollectiveAccess workflow

I’ve gotten a few emails lately from other library/archive organizations asking about how we use CollectiveAccess, open-source software for digital collections at museums, archives, and libraries. Our...

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Update to ‘Using Instagram for your library’

Heads up: I revised ‘Using Instagram for your library‘ to add a 4 more tips. We’re heavy Instagram users now at Lloyd Sealy Library; we post 2+ times a week when school is in session; we geotag and...

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Create a topic map of (some of) your institution’s publications in Gephi

February 5, 2015 2:47 PM Edited to add ScienceScape as a way to format your data without having to use Python February 6, 2015 1:22 PM Edited to add instructions for cleaning index keyword data Here’s...

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See through the Internet: workshop handout

I designed a new 30-minute workshop for students this semester called “See through the internet: 8 questions & answers about how the internet really works.” I’ve given it a total of 1 time so far,...

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Bootstrapping an emergency library backup site

TL;DR: I Bootstrapped lib.jjay.cc, a Library backup site with the links to online resources, hosted on my personal webspace with an official-ish domain name. — Over this past weekend, the John Jay...

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Updating the Murder Mystery Challenge library game

Previously: The Murder Mystery Challenge: a pilot project with an impressive turnout (2013) About the game In the fall of 2013, my colleague Marta and I created and organized a Murder Mystery...

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The faculty toolbox for online courses

When I code, I love simply copying and pasting from an example website or someone’s open source code. Most of my projects begin as a collage of different code samples that are gradually tuned to my...

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CollectiveAccess work environment

I wrote earlier about our CollectiveAccess workflow for uploading objects one-by-one and in a batch. Now I’ll share our CollectiveAccess work environment. We use two Ubuntu servers, development (test)...

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What did I do this year? 2014–15 edition

I jump-start my annual self-evaluation process with a low-level text analysis of my work log, essentially composed of “done” and “to do” bullet points. I normalized the text (e.g. emailed to email),...

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Heads Up! in PowerPoint for library class sessions

Since my John Jay colleague Kathleen Collins wrote about using active learning strategies in library “one-shot” sessions, I’ve been experimenting with games and hands-on activities to keep students...

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Invisible spam pages on our website: how we locked out a hacker

TL;DR: A hacker uploaded a fake JPG file containing PHP code that generated “invisible” spam blog posts on our website. To avoid this happening to you, block inactive accounts in Drupal and monitor...

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Embedded librarianship in Blackboard: examples

Half of my title is “Distance Services Librarian,” and while I had taken online courses while obtaining my library science degree, I wasn’t sure how to start integrating library resources into online...

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What did I do this year? 2015–16 edition

I jump-start my annual self-evaluation process with a low-level text analysis of my work log, essentially composed of “done” and “to do” bullet points. I normalized the text (e.g. emailed to email and...

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GoSoapbox for library class sessions

I’ve spent the last year experimenting with incorporating active learning practices into my library “one-shot” sessions (so-called because you have one shot to cram library research basics into their...

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CollectiveAccess importing workflow

This step-by-step workflow illustrates how I import objects (metadata + files) into CollectiveAccess. I’m writing this post partly to give others an idea of how to import content into CollectiveAccess...

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OER17 report-back: Four takeaways

I attended the OER17 Conference in London, April 5–6, 2017, with my colleague Ellen Sexton and with support from the Teaching & Learning Center here at John Jay. Though I’m relatively new to the...

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To scope or not to scope?

Our library homepage‘s main search area currently looks like this: The tab box has served us well for years, but it’s about time we upgraded to something simpler and easier to use. We plan to give our...

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What did I do this year? 2016-17 edition

Every year, I take all of my “Done” tasks in my daily work log, normalize them, and run them through a word cloud visualizer to see what I’ve been spending my time doing. This helps me as I write my...

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Using Twine for non-linear tutorials

I was first introduced to Twine through Birdland, a delightfully weird bit of e-lit. Its engine, Twine, is designed specially for interactive, nonlinear stories (the choose-your-own-adventure kind)....

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This blog has moved

I have consolidated my personal blog with this Emerging Tech in Libraries blog, since there’s a lot of overlap. I’ll still be active around the CUNY Academic Commons, but as for blogging, it will be...

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