My Favourite Tipples from a Digital Data Specialist
Jinfo Blog

By Bethan Ruddock

Abstract

My Favourite Tipples are shared by Bethan Ruddock, a librarian working with data-heavy library and archive services for Jisc. She shares her favourite online resources in areas from bibliographic and archive data to coding and time zones.

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My work on services and projects providing support for the UK education and research sectors means dipping my toes into all sorts of things, from bibliographic and archive data wrangling, to project management, training, and user support. Task switching means that I rely heavily on my trusted resources to help remind me how to do what I do!

• Twitter: There's no single resource that covers everything I do, but Twitter definitely comes closest. I follow about 1,000 people, most of them information professionals, which means that my timeline is always full of interesting items such as news, discussions and articles - and I'm always sure of getting some sort of answer or suggestion of where to look when I ask direct questions.

• StackExchange: I do intermittent bits of coding and other techie-ish bits, such as regex and unix commands, and the StackExchange sites (especially StackOverflow) are a great resource for "How do I...?" questions. They're a set of themed Q&A sites, and you don't have to actually ask anything yourself - there's a huge database of answered questions. Seeing multiple answers to questions is especially useful for an intermittent/casual programmer like me, as you have different things to try if the "best" answer doesn't work in your circumstances.

• Library of Congress MARC and EAD sites: These are invaluable for my work with bibliographic and archive data. They don't have an internal search, so when I need to search them I use Google Advanced Aearch, and limit it to loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/ or loc.gov/ead. For Encoded Archival Description (EAD), EADiva is also very useful. It demystifies a lot of the XML jargon, and helpfully builds up the various tags into a good example EAD document.

• World Time Buddy: I volunteer for SLA, which has members all over the world. We mainly work by teleconference, which requires a lot of time-zone wrangling. After missing a meeting once because I'd miscalculated the time difference, I swore never again! I like the clear layout of World Time Buddy, and the sign-in to save personalised settings and time zones.

For fun...

• ShopStyle: This is basically federated search for fashion! Decent filters and coverage, and great if you're looking for something specific, or just scanning for that perfect pair of shoes.

An article on FreePint I found particularly interesting: 

• I'm very interested in how data from various sources can be combined and used to meet real information needs. I like the way Constance Ard's article "Taking the Mystery Out of Big Data - Moving from Data Collection to Competitive Actions" breaks down the blanket (and often daunting) term of "big data", and provides clear next steps for how to assess and start using your organisation's data. 

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