LS589 - Week 2 blog post: Canva and TrackRef

This week I was so excited to find out that our assignment was to create an infographic. It’s something I’ve toyed with at work for a while but never committed to actually doing. I reached out to my professor to see if it would be acceptable to tailor the assignment to the public library where I work and after receiving approval, I got started on gathering data and statistics.

I started research in the usual places, thanks to my experience in grant writing: Census, State of the Child, American Community Survey, Center for Rural PA and the early research notes about my community (Williamsport, Lycoming County, Pennsylvania) are staggering, according to the latest Community Needs Assessment report. Here's my infographic:

After researching some of the popular infographic creation services such as Piktochart, Infogr.am, Venngage and Vizualize, I decided to use Canva. I heard about Canva from Guy Kawasaki – if you do anything with social media, you should follow him – and had been looking for a reason to play around with it. Canva makes design simple for everyone of any ability to create designs for Web or print, blog graphics, presentations, Facebook covers, flyers, posters, invitations and much more. My library employs a part-time graphic artist, so it’s not a skill I’ve needed to master but I’m excited to play around with it this week.

On a side note, while reading Kawasaki’s bio, I noticed he also was involved with BagTheWeb, a Web-based service to organize and share websites. Our class has been using Diigo and Feedly to save webpages, but I’m always interested in new resources, so I’ll look into that more later …

Our readings for the week focused on ebooks, reference and instructional tools, subject guide tools, LibData, statewide subscription databases, federated search tools and consortial ebook platforms.

I was immediately drawn to the mention of LibStats as a way to tally reference questions online rather than using hash marks (as my library does). Before I pass along LibStats to my assistant director, who is in charge of the reference department, I figured I should research it first. I’m glad I did! Several librarians and sites mentioned that the code is no longer updated and full of bugs. That got me back to square one. I then read an article here about TrackRef, which is a free statistics tracking program meant for library reference departments. Unfortunately, I know nothing about code and downloading this type of software so I will pass it along to my library’s IT department to see if it’s something worth considering.

It got me thinking about how quickly things change in our digital world – something written about, researched and studied in 2011 is now no longer “new” and will most likely not meet our current digital needs. I’m probably dating myself by saying my first computer was a Commodore 64 and in elementary school we played Oregon Trail on Apple IIe computers. Aaaaannnnd, I just spent the past hour reliving my childhood playing Oregon Trail. Sadly, I died of measles. But I did have fun writing my tombstone epitaph!