China Data Online (China Data Center)

*Now with census data and GIS spatial data including Esri shapefiles.

(*GIS spatial data through China Geo-Explorer II works best with Internet Explorer.)

A statistical database with the following datasets:

• Monthly Statistics
• National Statistics
• Provincial Statistics
• City Statistics
• County Statistics
• Monthly Industrial Data
• Monthly Industrial Data 1999-2002
• Yearly Industrial Data
• Yearly Industrial Data 1999-2002
• Statistics on Map
• Provincial Yearbook (2002 – )
• Provincial Yearbook ( – 2001)
• City Yearbook
• National Yearbook

China Data Center offers some freebies on its website, including a list of geo-spatial vector data including lakes, rivers, canals, and other landforms and a separate listing of free, two-dimensional maps including traffic noise in major cities, coal production, and energy consumption, to name only a few.

* There are 1102 items that have circulated more than 50 times

* Of those…
– 510 are DVDs
– 178 are student laptops and power adapters
– 96 are 1-day equipment
– 86 are books
– 81 are 4-hour equipment
– the rest include 12 CD’s, 1 music score, various keys, reserves, and 3 VHS tapes

* The top 151 items are keys or equipment

* No. 152 on the list is the DVD 21 Grams, with 261 circs

* The highest circulating books is the always popular Single Variable Calculus, which any circ desk worker knows by both sight and weight, with 216 circs

Any guesses on No. 1? It has circulated 1698 times. Unimaginable praise and accolades* to anyone who guesses correctly (who does not already know and/or does not use Create Lists to find out on their own).

*Note: praise and accolades may be more imaginable than advertised.

• Monthly Statistics
• National Statistics
• Provincial Statistics
• City Statistics
• County Statistics
• Monthly Industrial Data
• Monthly Industrial Data 1999-2002
• Yearly Industrial Data
• Yearly Industrial Data 1999-2002
• Statistics on Map
• Provincial Yearbook (2002 – )
• Provincial Yearbook ( – 2001)
• City Yearbook
• National Yearbook

China Data Center offers some freebies on its website, including a list of geo-spatial vector data including lakes, rivers, canals, and other landforms and a separate listing of free, two-dimensional maps including traffic noise in major cities, coal production, and energy consumption, to name only a few.

NASA satellite image of China

After Scott Simon’s remarks, there was a brief IUG business meeting, at which I learned there are now 1200 institutional members of IUG.

On to the sessions – the presentation materials for all of these (except as noted) have been uploaded to O:\orgs\LIS\LISstaff\ILS III Millennium User Materials\IUG 2010 materials

Day 1 – afternoon:
I went to Create Lists during the first session (Dan attended on day 3); all that I will add to Dan’s report is that she covered a lot, I could tell it was useful, I wrote some of it down (HAS is not a keyword search), but I’m not sure I got enough to pass it along, and I don’t think there was sufficient info on the slides (mostly screenshots) to pass it along, either. Nonetheless, if there is interest, I can probably either run an info session or post my notes on the server for my colleagues in Collections (and others) who may be interested.

The Statistical reports session was a let-down; not much that I didn’t already know.

I got my first introduction to regular expressions in the Playing with MATCHES session, like Dan did.  A whole new world has been revealed – slight exaggeration.  Seriously, I’m kinda psyched to have learned about this and have confiscated the library’s copy of Mastering regular expressions (the location is “Catalog Office” and I’m kind of in the Catalog Office, so I’m not checking it out.  It is available for check-out if you’d like, just don’t look on the shelf where the other “Catalog Office” books are).  In addition to the slides from his presentation, the presenter included a handout listiing metacharacters that are valid in Create Lists – the handout is on the server, above.

Day 2 …

… started off with a session on Working with Millennium data in Excel.  This session introduced two tools – text-to-columns and pivot-table – and two functions – COUNTIF and TODAY() – that are very helpful in manipulating data that have been exported from Millennium into Excel.  The presenter was from a public library system (with multiple branches) in Oregon and his examples were circ-related, mostly using patron data, but the tools/functions will be useful for Acquisitions and Serials data and perhaps Cataloging as well.

I went to a couple of Innovative sales pitches, the first was Managing your digital collections which described three Innovative products.  Content Pro is the equivalent to CONTENTdm, which we won’t be letting go of anytime soon.  Symposia is Content Pro on steroids (my paraphrase) – an institutional repository system that allows fairly granular specification regarding who on campus can access or add material to the repository; the word ‘sophisticated’ was used repeatedly.  Perhaps most applicable to us is Encore Harvesting – for libraries that use Encore (Innovative’s ‘discovery tool’; we do not use it at this time), Encore Harvesting allows incorporation of metadata from another digital collection (CONTENTdm in our case) with the bibliographic database so that searches will return search results from the ‘library’ database and the digital collection and the other resources included in Encore’s universe.

Since my primary motivation for attending IUG was to improve our understanding and usage of Millennium’s Electronic Resources Management (ERM) tool, I attended the ERM forum.  (The ERM is kind of a parallel catalog that describes and retains vital information about our electronic resources – article and index databases, full-text journal sources, etc.)  At the forum, the product manager for the ERM presented the updates for the 2009B release (available “imminently”).  The big news is the ability to link license records to multiple resource records.  (In our case that means we could use one license record for, say, ProQuest, and link it to our resource records for ProQuest Psychology Journals and ProQuest Education Journals and ….)  There are also improvements regarding maintenance of the ERM and also ticklers (setting up email notifications for trial expirations, for example).

In the afternoon, I attended the Serials forum.  Innovative’s Serials product manager was not in attendance, so many questions went answered.  I asked for a show of hands of how many have stopped checking in journals.  (This has, at times,  been a topic of interest on the serials-listserv and the sense I got from the traffic on the listserv is that many institutions have stopped checking in print journals.)  I was surprised that in a room of a couple hundred people, only two raised their hands indicating they no longer check in print journals.

The last session of day 2 was Demystifying license mapping – the promise of ONIX-PL. The idea here is that publishers of online material will standardize their license terms and, when that happens, it will be possible to standardize license records and when that happens, the world will be a better place – for one thing we will all know, clearly, whether or not we can fill an ILL request for a certain article.  The consensus in the room seemed to be that we (libraries) need to tell publishers (e.g., Elsevier) that we want this and we want it now – because until some publishers use it, Innovative can’t test it and make it happen, and publishers don’t want to do it because none of the ILSs are ONIX-PL-capable, plus they seem to like being vague about whether ILL requests can be filled. (The presentation for this session was not made available.)

Day 3

The first session of Day 3 turned out to be something of a repeat of the ERM forum – going over what’s new in the 2009B release for the ERM and also for CASE (Innovative’s equivalent of the services we obtain from Serials Solutions).  Afterwards, I took the opportunity to introduce myself to the ERM product manager and ask him some newbie questions about how the ERM is used for e-books.  (Middlebury is currently evaluating e-book vendors.)  It was an interesting conversation that I will relate in more detail to anyone who is interested.

Perhaps the highlight for me came in the second session of Day 3 – Analyzing your electronic resources investment: tools and strategies.  Co-presented by the ERM product manager from III, and the Systems- and Electronic-Resources-Librarians from Wayne State University, it was a description of using Counting Online Usage of NeTwork E-Resources (COUNTER) statistics (journal usage statistics in xml form) with features of the ERM to analyze how expenditures made on electronic resources are being used. Since returning, I’ve made an initial contact with the person at EBSCO (our major journal subscription vendor and purveyor of numerous databases) who helps with this. Barbara Merz and I will collaborate on implementing this and, hopefully, start importing user stats of the EBSCO databases in the next few weeks. After that, we’ll start working with other vendors.

The final session I attended was MARC Madness – batch record loads. (MAchine Readable Cataloging [MARC] is the metadata standard used for the records that describe our books and other items in the library database.) We do a number of batch loads of bibliographic records – government documents, online journals, and more.  The presentation seemed aimed at libraries that have been slow to do this. It was my introduction, though, to MARCEdit, a desktop stand-alone freeware package that enables easier editing of bib records than one can do directly in Millennium.

That’s a brief summary of the sessions I attended. In addition to the ERM product manager (Bob), I chatted briefly with the ERM product engineer (Mike) and also met our Innovative Rep, Pablo.

Feel free to ask any questions.

In the folder O:\ORGS\LIS\LISstaff\ILS III Millennium User Materials\EZProxy statistics you can see stats relating to useage of on-line resources through EZProxy. These are in the form of a bunch of .html files accessed through an index file I’ve named +START HERE 2009.html.

The other is a spreadsheet of the record counts and numbers for the various record types in the III database. O:\ORGS\LIS\LISstaff\ILS Implementation-III\III record counts.xls

If anyone uses these, they should be accessed somehow through the new website. Or they can be abolished as a “not to do” task.  Anybody care one way or the other?

First, the definition of the question took some untangling. Does this mean current subscriptions? Does it mean individual subscriptions that we choose specifically to receive, or does it count the titles we receive as part of “big deals” from vendors like Elsevier? Does it mean stuff we pay cold hard cash for, or does it include freebies, such as the 4000+ open access journals that are readily accessible on the web (and which are all included in the library catalog)? Or does it mean just the print stuff we receive in hard copy?

After some hemming & hawing, I decided the most interesting questions were: 1) how many journal titles do we have access to altogether, both current & ceased? and 2) how many journal titles do we currently subscribe to, regardless of format, regardless of cost?

With help from the cataloging, acquisitions, and serials departments, I discovered that:
1) we currently have access to an astounding total of approximately 42,443 journal titles; and
2) of these, approximately 38,000 are current.

Furthermore, about 5,100+ are print titles (current & ceased) and we have free web access to about 4,300+ titles from the Directory of Open Access. Catalog records for all of these titles are in MIDCAT.

This is an incredible resource for our students and faculty (and staff!), and many thanks to all the people — acquisitions & collection development folks, catalogers, systems people, infrastructure people, librarian liaisons & selectors, etc. etc. — who have worked hard over the years to make this possible. And this is just one small part of the many many many services LIS provides. Really amazing.

The Quantitative Analysis Lab (QAL) in LIB 105 is up and running! On Sunday, Wednesday, and Thursday evenings peer tutors are available to help students with the statistics packages Stata, SPSS, and Minitab (see the schedule, below.) In addition, other quantitative software packages are available on the computers in LIB 105, including Data Desk, R, Maple, Mathematica, MatLab, Excel, and Geometer’s Sketchpad. The lab will be a great resource for students who are working in the main library, and can potentially bring together people working on a variety of subjects, topics, and projects.

Quantitative Analysis Lab Schedule

Sundays:

• Minitab tutor: 7 – 10 pm
• Stata tutor: 8:30 – 10 pm

Wednesdays:

• Stata tutor: 8:30 – 10 pm
• SPSS tutor:  8:30-10 pm

Thursdays:

• Stata tutor: 8:30 – 10 pm

Note:  During QAL tutoring hours, students working with tutors will be given preference, but other students may use the lab if space is available.