Elias Tzoc blog!

That’s right, the Flickr deadline (June 1st) for downloading the “stats” from late 2007 to April 2010 is only 4 days away  …so I guess that counts as bad news.  So what’s the good news? well, with the recent changes in the Flickr Stats API, some developers have taken the initiative to create interesting data-presentation for the flickr stats.  For instance, flickrstats lets users with a Pro account process their historical referrer data and visualize it in a very interactive and graphic interface –a la Google Analytics.   I think this is another example of a great application that was possible by combining the “flexibility” from flickr and the “creativity” from those developers out there.

There is a video (demo) available here -and if things go the way they’re supposed to, once you’ve authenticated your flickr account at http://stats.vispillo.org/ in minutes you could get a nice image like this one:

It seems like the pie charts are displaying only the top 10 results -and at this point, I’m not sure if there is a way to change/customize that, …but they do have an option for viewing a more complete list of all the referrers and search terms at the very bottom of that initial page; additionally, users can drag/select specific time periods and the graphs get updated immediately -very cool!  This is definitely a very nice complement for reporting flickr stats …and it’ll probably continue to get better; in the future, a couple of items in a “wish list” will probably include:

• percentages or sub-totals on the pie charts
• text fields or a calendar for entering date ranges
• options for exporting reports to other formats -e.g. PDF, XML, etc?

Well, maybe that’s too much to ask for -at least now, but again, I think (hope) this is just the beginning of some great developments on the flickr stats data! …it’d be nice to have a service like this as part of the default services in Flickr, we’ll wait and see!

The MUL’s Diversity Cluster was part of a panel presentation at the 2010 Ohio Consortium of Multicultural Centers in Higher Education (OCMCHE) Conference -held on April 30 at Kent State University.

Two members of the Diversity Cluster along with three other librarians from the University of Toledo and Wright State University shared their experiences in using LibGuides to promote diversity programs and resources.  This presentation involved the audience in a discussion about future collaborations with multicultural centers on campus, especially for promoting events along with scholarly resources already available through the library system.

We believe our participation from a library community was a useful and unique addition to the OCMCHE conference and we hope to see more/new collaboration initiatives with other offices on campus in the future.