The Library Dwelling RN

Perhaps I’m a little too into library work, since my partner said this to me:

“I’m afraid you will have a life-long love affair with things that organize information.”

Ha! This was in response to me sending him a link to Many Eyes. It’s a data visualization website that I thought was super cool. Oh, the things I find “cool” these days. *nerd*

Most data visualizations (or information visualizations: you’ll hear people call these types of things by different names) are easy to create and are a lot more effective at communicating a message about a data set to a passerby than say, a big chart crammed full of numbers. Of course, Excel can create fun little graphs for you, but there are tools on the web available that let you do some creative things too. An example of one of these is Wordle, which is a site that lets you create word clouds.

Recently a few of my colleagues used Wordle to design a word cloud for one of their scholarly posters:

If you’re interested to see how they incorporated it into their finished poster, you can access it from Mellanye Lackey’s Meet Your Librarian page. The title of the poster is Surveying the Global Health Efforts of Health Sciences Libraries.