I’m waiting for one of my colleagues to lend me some books on bibliometrics. However, in the meantime, in my naïveté, I have created a metric[1]. My metric is not a terribly good one, though perhaps it is no worse than some other well-established ones. While it somewhat defensibly measures reach and productivity, my metric… Continue reading I made my own altmetric
Author: Mark Eaton
DIY Twitter analytics
Our library uses Twitter (@kbcclibrary) to communicate with our students and faculty. Along with our tweeting, we rely on metrics to keep tabs on our Twitter presence. We get these metrics exclusively from free tools: the native Twitter Analytics page, but also third party analytics sites like Tweetstats and the free version of (the unfortunately… Continue reading DIY Twitter analytics
On trying (and failing) to learn shell scripting
I tried to lean shell scripting in the summer of 2000. It seemed doable: isn’t it basically executing a bunch of shell commands in a row? I got some books, which I read half-heartedly, tried a few things, and then gave up. Shell scripting, which I had hoped would be the easiest entrée into programming,… Continue reading On trying (and failing) to learn shell scripting
Visualizing library data
Using Twarc-Report, a tool made by Peter Binkley at the University of Alberta Libraries, I made some visualizations of our library’s archive of twitter data. Here’s one of them: This shows how the hashtags in various tweets about Kingsborough are related. You can see the full interactive version of that visualization here. Neat, right? Twarc-Report… Continue reading Visualizing library data
The many uses of Git
Git is version control and collaboration software. It’s initially unintuitive and takes some time to learn (command line!), but it’s also powerful, broadly useful and generally awesome. I wish more librarians used Git because of the benefits it could bring to our collaborations. Git is closely related to Github, which makes it possible to share… Continue reading The many uses of Git
Archiving tweets about Kingsborough
Last year, I heard about a python program called Twarc, which was developed by Ed Summers, a software developer at the University of Maryland, to capture and archive tweets. Back in August, Ed demonstrated the effectiveness of this tool by capturing over 13 million tweets about events in Ferguson, MO as they unfolded over the… Continue reading Archiving tweets about Kingsborough
