Share Your Data!

NiemanLab is trying an experiment: in a blog post called Share your data! Tell us how your readers arrive at your site: search, social media, the front door?, they are asking readers to do just that. Joshua Benton states what libraries know, that there is a lot to be learned from sharing information (his actual quote: "there’s lots to be learned from seeing how one site’s audience compares to another’s.") and asked readers who run a news website to post answers to 4 questions:

1. What percentage of your traffic comes from search engines?
2. What percentage of your traffic comes from facebook.com?
3. What percentage of your traffic comes from twitter.com?
4. What percentage of your site’s visits begin on your front page?

The comments are chock full of interesting data.

I'd love to see similar data for libraries! I recently attended Paul Signorelli and Char Booth's ALA TechSource webcast on the Role of Web Analytics in the Library (post-class post and discussion) and am looking more carefully at my data.

I was initially very surprised to see that about 29% of my website's traffic comes from Google. But after knowing that and watching students navigate to my website during reference encounters, I see that instead of bookmarking the page, they just Google "park library jomc" or a variation. Mystery solved.

My challenge to you: read Benson's post, and then come back & post your library's analytic data. Respond to these questions, for the last 30 days:

1. How do people get to your website & in what %? (This is called "Traffic Sources Overview" in Google Analytics.)
2. Top 2-3 search terms to used in search to get to you.
3. What are your top 2-3 pages?

(thanks to the Daily Tar Heel's Sara Gregory for tweeting her response to the this post)

Twitter & the Library of Congress

You may have seen that the Library of Congress will be archiving Tweets for the future. Here are my tweets on the topic, which should provide a brief summary of some useful articles:

How Tweet It Is!: Library of Congress Acquires, Saves Entire Twitter Archive, blog post @ blogs.LoC.gov, April 14, 2010.

Retweet of UNC SILS PhD student @fstutzman: "Good American Prospect interview w/ Library of Congress (LoC) re: Twitter: Deal is signed, done, LoC doesn't know about opt out. Ugh." The Library of Congress Is Now Following You on Twitter. Phoebe Connelly, April 16, 2010.

Retweet of UNC SILS / JoMC professor @smalljones: "Archivist of the United States makes case for (LoC) saving tweets." AOTUS: Collector in Chief » Tweets: What We Might Learn From Mundane Details. David Ferraro, April 16, 2010.

The Library and Twitter: An FAQ « Library of Congress Blog, Matt Raymond, April 28, 2010.

Retweet of Duke's "Digital strategist and plate-spinner" @paoloman: Digital Domain - A Sea of History - Twitter at the Library of Congress, New York Times, April 30, 2010.

Government Web Site Widgets

I just had two great librarians talk to my reference class, and I learned as much as the students did about government documents work and GIS / geography sources. Thanks to UConn's undergraduate and GIS librarian Michael Howser and Connecticut's federal documents librarian Nancy Peluso!

Nancy showed a fabulous feature of usa.gov, the US government's search engine. A search for the word widgets yields some amazing widgets, free for use on any web site.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has many widgets, including an FDA peanut recall widget, a National Flu Activity map, and a Daily Health tip (today's is a warning not to give birds as gifts):


This is also available in Spanish:




Other cool widgets that come up include:

• San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District "BART" News Widget
• AmeriCorps widgets
• Business.gov Gadgets; their widget includes a search box and links to information helpful to small businesses.
• FDA Drug Information links, including widgets for drug safety information, Medwatch, FDA podcasts, and Drugs @ FDA

... search for, oh, say, Wellbutrin & see what kind of information you get.

Take a peek at the search, too -- the results page offers a nifty preview option, displaying the widget right in the results page, and a "Remix" option on the left which lets you narrow results by topic, agency, or source.

There are some great free web resources here for libraries, health marketers, and others.

Meet Paul Jones!

I heard a fascinating interview with Paul Jones, a clinical associate professor at UNC-Chapel Hill's School of Journalism and Mass Communications and a clinical associate professor in the School of Information and Library Science. Frank Stasio, interviewer for WUNC, also calls Jones a "public intellectual."
The interview is a like a whirlwind tour of the interwebs, as Jones talked about having worked with Tim Berners-Lee (the birth of the Internet), Larry Lessig (the birth of the Creative Commons), and Brewster Kahle (the birth of the online archive), as well as a bit about setting up ibiblio.org. Jones talked about Roger McGuinn and Youssou N'Dour (find out what they have in common!). He also read a lovely poem he wrote called Dividing Waters and talked about what poetry and coding have in common.

If you have 49 minutes and are interested in the interwebs, I highly recommend this interview.

For More Information

• Meet Paul Jones, The State of Things, North Carolina Public Radio WUNC, Feb. 16, 2008. Also on iTunes.
  
• IntraHealth OPEN and Youssou N’Dour promote Open Source for Health in Africa with music downloads. The Real Paul Jones, Jan. 24, 2009.