Monthly Archives: October 2017

We had 24 attendees at today’s event, which was held in the library’s conference room. Our discussion focused on data management and data visualization.

Generating Maps in Microsoft Excel

Ryan Phillips gave an overview of the mapping feature that is available as a plugin in older versions of Excel and as a standard feature in Excel 2016. Examples he shared:

With this example of a incomplete tracking map showing Hurricane Ophelia poised to strike Ireland, we talked about how mapping tools are sometimes not up to the tasks we have in mind.

R Shiny

Charlie Terng showed how you can use the Shiny package for R to create visualizations of data. He’s been using ggplot2 to put together a dashboard of information about circulation of library books and is looking at how he might use Shiny. He showed us three visualization examples on the Shiny website to give us a sense of what the system can do:

• movie explorer
• Google charts
• Superzip

iDashboards

Ralph Englander showed some screenshots of the work he’s done in the iDashboards system to display various metrics from the library. One challenge of his project has been the task of having to manually load data into the system.

Tableau

We looked at the dashboard of CUNY-wide data from library systems that the CUNY Office of Library Services has posted on its free Tableau account.

Monitoring Activity on the Campus Network

Mike Richichi and Phil Tejera spoke about how BCTC uses Cacti and MRTG to keep tabs on the levels of activity on the campus network.

Upcoming Tech Sharecase Events

• November 10
• December 8

The locations will be announced shortly. Please submit any suggestions for discussion topics on this editable Google Doc.