 Today's presenter is Bob Coates. He is an analyst in the demographic and economic analysis section of the North Carolina Office of State Budget and Management. The governor's census liaison and the coordinator of the North Carolina State Data Center Network, a dissemination partnership between the U.S. Census Bureau and 45 affiliate organizations statewide. And today he's going to talk to us about log into North Carolina, the data portal for North Carolina. And as Linda mentioned, I'm Bob Coates with the North Carolina Office of State Budget and Management. I coordinate the North Carolina State Data Center Network, which is a partnership with the U.S. Census Bureau. Part of that role is to coordinate the dissemination, the sharing of statistical information from the Census Bureau, but also from state and other federal government resources. And for a long time, one of our main tools for doing that was the log into North Carolina system, or LINC. Now it's log into North Carolina because it's a very old system. It was created in the late 70s and all the data lived on a mainframe environment and users had to have an access code and you had to dial in. You had to request data sets by knowing data, catalog numbers. It was great for the time, but it was a very old technology, a very old resource. In the 1990s, that system was migrated from the mainframe onto the web to be a web-based service and it was open to everyone. You didn't have to have a user ID. You could just go in. You could create queries, pull the information that you wanted. And for the technologies of the time, it was fantastic, but expectations of data manipulation, data access have changed. So we're in the process of migrating LINC to a new environment. Now, excuse me, before we take a look at New LINC, I want to give you a quick look at what I hope you're already familiar with. We're not going to spend too much time on this, but I do want to take a look at the existing version or the legacy version of LINC. So to get to LINC, there's a direct URL of LINCLINC.STATE.NC.US. And as you can see, this is the, if you go to that web address, you'll land here. And you'll see a start LINC now button. This will take you to the legacy version of LINC and then you'll see explore the new LINC here. So let's take a quick look at old LINC before we take a look at what new LINC is. First of all, I did not design the color scheme. I can hear you groaning through the phone. I am not responsible for the green, red, and white. But as you come into LINC, you'll see it looks like an older website, which is what it is. We understand with LINC that the system and the state data center program answers over 80,000 data requests and data research projects a year. And over three quarters of those are coming from local businesses and local governments. But we also get a lot of requests from students, from researchers, from the media, from the general public. And some of those users are novice users. They don't know anything about how to access the data. They may have heard about LINC. They may have stumbled across the website. But they have no idea what's in LINC or how to get to the data. So we've tried to make LINC functional enough that it serves the novice user and it has functionality that will serve our higher end users as well. So when you first come into LINC, there's a three-step process to create a customized report. So if you have a general idea of what you're looking for, if you know you want information for a given county or a municipality, there are help screens and prompts to get you to what you need. So the default geographies are North Carolina, all the counties, and that's scrollable with an option to include sub-county areas. At this point, if you're a brand new novice user and you have no idea what's there or you don't really know what kind of data you want, you're just exploring. LINC also has some pre-formatted reports. These are what we used to call topic reports in the legacy system. LINC has over 1,200 individual data series, and a data series could be something like total population. We have that data for North Carolina, for all the counties, for municipalities. From 1969 and for the counties in the state, it's projected out to 2038. So that's one data series. We have over 1,200 of those. And to make it a little bit more manageable, we have organized them into general topic areas. So if you look on the right-hand side, you'll see profiles that are organized in population and housing. That's a topic group. Vital statistics and health. That's a topic group. Social and human services, education, law enforcement. So if we pick any one of those, pardon me, the default here is the multi-topic profile. That's kind of the greatest hits, the most popular data items from across the different topic groups. And this defaults to North Carolina, but you'll see you have the option of all the counties. So if we will just stick with North Carolina, click Go, and then we are prompted for a year. So we'll just grab 2014 and Go. So we get a tabular report that shows information from total population to cash receipts from government payments for farms down to traffic accident fatalities. And at the bottom of the report, we have all the metadata. So descriptive information about what these variables actually mean and the agency that reported those data items. Now to the right of each data item, you see a V and then a number. That's a variable ID number. And that's a throwback to the original version of Link where you had to have a data catalog. When we migrated this service over to being web-based, we didn't want to lose our legacy users who were used to using those ID numbers. So we kept them as part of the resource. For our high-end users, if you knew that you wanted to look at farm cash receipts from government payments, that's variable 120. At the main Link screen, you could type in variable 120, your geographic code in the year, and generate a report automatically. So that was just a throwback feature. So those were topic reports. And they were available for, as I mentioned, the 13 main topic groups. We also had the ability to browse all Link, and this lets you go into Link and see the data that are reported by various federal and state agencies. So if we're interested in information from the Department of Labor, we could click on Labor and Go, and they only report the youth work certificates for the state and counties, and they're reported annually, and you could create a data report from there. Just to show a generic report, if we wanted to find, say, the population for all counties, we could click the All Counties button, and it says, okay, you don't have to check all the individual counties, and then we can click the Continue button. Now we're over into the area where we select our topic categories, and the default is population and housing, but we could change that to any of the others. But we want to look at population, and we see here that there are different types of population, the same variable seems to be reported multiple times. Well, how do we know which one we want? Well, you could click on the data name, you'll get a pop-up window with the metadata that describes what that variable is. This happens to have a lot of detail. It reports who reports that data, how frequently it's reported the earliest year of data, and the latest year of data. So if this looks like what we want, we check the box, and you'll notice that here at the bottom, it lets you know what you've created so far, what you've selected, All Counties, 5001. We see that listed here. That's the variable ID number, and when we click Continue, we'll see all the years that are available. So if we click 2038, and then View Report, we'll see all the counties, the 2038 estimated population, and since we have all the counties, we can actually rank that. So according to the data, Wake County will be slightly bigger than Mecklenburg County in 2038. So that's basically what Old Link, or existing Link looks like. It's been a very valuable tool for what it is. It presents tabular data, which is great for some folks. And in 1995, that was a fantastic technology, but obviously data visualizations, expectations of data, and the amount of data that are being reported have grown tremendously since 1995. The Link system that we have on the screen right now is manually maintained. So there's a staff person that has to go out and look for data updates, make sure that the data updates are formatted properly, and then upload it into Link. Maintaining metadata is also a task for staff. Occasionally, there'll be a change in how data are being reported. An example would be SAT scores. Occasionally, the Department of Public Instruction has changed the way the formatted structure of how SAT scores are reported. So we needed to change the data series in Link. So all of that involved a lot of manual work, and while it's a great resource, it can be very time-consuming. And that time means that by the time some data is there, it may not be as fresh as data users would like it to be. So with that in mind, the Office of State Budget and Management and the State Data Center have looked at the moving Link into the 21st century. So if you're in old Link, there's a Link at the top that will take you into the new and enhanced version. And I hope I'm hearing lots of odds. Like, this looks a lot better. So this follows the design scheme for the Office of State Budget and Management and the general design structure for a lot of state government websites. But you'll notice that you are in the Link system. And the first thing that you'll notice is often the fact that it looks a lot better on your eyes. The very first thing that you see is Register Today. Now, the old Link was open to anybody, and so is the new Link. Anyone can come in and use the new version of Link. But there are some very big benefits to being a registered user. First of all, it's free. It doesn't cost you anything. And it allows you to save your work. And that's going to be a big feature when we get into demoing some of the functionality that's in the new Link. You can also, and I do want to point out with New Link, that this is still very much a work in progress. Old Link, as I mentioned, was constantly being updated with new data. That same thing is going to be true with New Link. We're never going to be 100% complete on this. And we're still in the process of enhancing the new system, so there are going to be some hiccups along the way. So you're going to see some new functionalities that come online. You're going to see new functionalities, and you're going to see more standardization across datasets. So as you see hiccups right now, please understand that we're still in the migration process. All the data from Old Link is in New Link. Both systems are being maintained for the time being. But you will see some new features coming on board here that weren't in Old Link. Also, we're interested at the new version of Link uses an open data format, open data platform. So we'll be able to use API calls and automated harvesting to bring in data for more and more state agencies, included data that are reported in a much more timely fashion. It could possibly be if we're looking at things like storm surge information during hurricane events, we could have real-time data reported through Link. To manage some of the user experiences, we don't want to make all of that data available to people who may not really want it. So registered users will get more access to more of the data, whereas the more generic users may just get very much the tip of the iceberg data. Registered users will also be able, once we get into the datasets, and you see datasets that are really interesting to you, you'll be able to say, hey, I'd like to get updates on when this is updated. So you'll get an email notification when new data is available, when a dataset has been enhanced. As I mentioned, you'll be able to save your work. So if you create a visualization within the New Link, registered users will be able to save that, and it'll be updated when the datasets are updated. So there are some really big benefits to becoming a registered user, and I would encourage all of you in the library community to go ahead and become a registered user. If nothing else, it lets us know on the back end, it gives you access to send us feedback on what's working, what's not working, and we very much want to hear that. It also shows us what the most popular datasets are that our registered users are using. If we need to expand those datasets, it just lets us know where the traffic is. So please, please, if you have time, go ahead and become a registered user. So as we scroll down, the next item that you see on the site are categories. Now, this is just a little bit of a, there's going to be some change of lingo and change of concept between Old Link and New Link. So if you're familiar with the Old Link, these categories are the same thing as the old topic reports. So categories and topics are interchangeable as a concept. So we looked at the multi-topic profile. When we were in Old Link, that's the same as the intro to North Carolina profile here. So by clicking on that, now we get a little bit of textual lead-in explaining what you're looking at. And we have a little bit of loading here. And you'll see the data on the side. By default here, we're looking at North Carolina data. It gives us 20-10 population. It gives high school graduates. So we're getting some data from a number of different sources, just like in the multi-topic profile. But on the left-hand side, we see county options. So if the North Carolina data is great, but you're really interested in seeing Beaufort County data, we can click on that. The map will redraw to highlight Beaufort County, but the data will refresh to show us just Beaufort County's data. Also a feature that you guys will notice right away is there's a map in the middle of the page. Mapping was not a feature of the older version of Link. So that's an addition that OpenData and the new platform offers to us. If we scroll down a little bit, you'll also notice a pie chart here, which if we hover over it shows us detailed percentage and the actual metric point for educational attainment for Beaufort County. If we chose to clear the Beaufort County filter, we would see data for North Carolina. And then the information here would refresh to the level of geography that you've selected. So we have the ability to create dynamic charts within the new version of Link. And really the intent of all of these category pages are just to meet that need of the novice user. The intention of Link from the very beginning had been not to give you all the information that's ever been available for North Carolina, but to be your first best place to go to find some general information about North Carolina, whatever that topic area may be, whatever the category. So we're hoping to expand that and to provide some new facets for getting that information. So this just shows you, the topic reports will show you the functionality of the new system and very much just a little hint of the types of data that are available in the different categories that you're looking for. So this is the introduction to Link page. I do, I probably skipped ahead a little too quick, but if you'll notice at the top of the page we have some navigation buttons here. Home will always take you back to the main starting page, including the category Link areas. The data area will take you into the data catalog, and we're going to go there shortly. Mapping and charting, just like the name says, will take you in areas where you'll be able to generate maps and create dynamic charts. You can also create maps and dynamic charts within the data catalog. This is just another way of getting there. The help screen, and I'll point that out since we're here, is designed, we're still in the process of fleshing this out, but it's designed to give you some general guidance on how to use the system that we're in now. There are some YouTube videos that are available and you see those linked here. We're in the process of working with our developers to have some videos created that are specific to the link format. Right now this shows you how to use the open data system that we're in, but in the future these videos will show you how to use not only the open data system, but the link open data system. Right now it's generic, but it'll be more specific, hopefully within the next couple of months. Then we have the contact button here. The contact button just takes you to a form where anyone can provide a little feedback, a question, can say they're having an issue with something, and that gets shared with our editorial team here in the office. Again, the registered users get an opportunity to provide more detailed feedback, so again, another benefit to being a registered user. I would encourage everyone, when you have a little time, you can glance at some of the visualizations for the different category pages. They all have a map. They all have the general tabular layout at the top, the different types of charting that are available. So here we have a stack bar chart. Some will have line charts, and we're going to talk a little bit about the different types of charting that are available within the system in a little bit. But hopefully for a lot of your users, if they're coming into a public library or a university library and they just want to see some general information, maybe you've got folks who are thinking about relocating to North Carolina and they want a little bit of information about potentially where to go, this might be a great first place to start. Our own page, the next item that we come to are highlighted stories. Again, another feature, another benefit of being a registered user. As a registered user, you're able to, as I mentioned, save your visualizations, any charts, any maps that you may create. But as you apply those, most folks are not just creating pretty charts and pretty maps for the fun of it, but they're doing it because they have a project, they have a report, they're doing some analysis to solve an issue. So as those data items get included in charts and reports and projects, you have the ability to show off the work that you're doing as a highlighted story. So any registered user can show off their data projects, whether they're using, they don't necessarily have to use the link if they're just using data or visualizations to tell a story or to solve a problem. We'd like to highlight how data is being used across North Carolina. So any registered user can highlight their story. You just have to share it with us. This is a good time for me to mention that the first highlighted story is the North Carolina Complete Count Committees Census Promotion website. So it should look a little familiar because it's actually using the same structure that we've been working with, that we've highlighted so far. But I also, as the Governor Census lead, I'm obligated to tell all you folks, since I've got you on the line, that you have a vital role to play for the 2020 census. We're certainly able to talk about this at a later point. But the 2020 census will be the first census in the United States to use the Internet as a primary response point. So postcards will be mailed out in March of next year, inviting everyone in the United States to respond to the 2020 census. And they'll be encouraged to use either their smartphone or to use their laptop and the Internet to respond. We obviously know that in North Carolina we have areas where broadband Internet access are not as strong as other areas. And so the public libraries can be a key component. They can be an access point for folks in those areas to come in and actually respond to the census. So I would encourage folks to take a look at the Complete Count Committee data story that's here and to check out the Complete Count Committees Census Information page at census.nc.gov. That site has more information and it's being populated with more and more content every day. We plan on having information on there for public libraries including information sheets you can print off and have available for anyone who comes in and may be interested in filling out their census. So I've fulfilled my obligation to mention library census support, but there's obviously a larger conversation to have there. And I welcome chatting with you folks in the future about that. So the data stories we have, how data is being used to promote the census we have, how data was used to deal with hurricane Florence recovery here in North Carolina was a very big part of what the Office of State Budget and Management did in the immediate aftermath of Florence to inform the General Assembly and help drive funding out to meet the needs of the communities that were hardest hit. And also our state demographer produces certified annual population estimates and projections. So he produces a publication each year when his estimates come out. So we have his latest data linked here as well. These are just the initial placeholders we'd love for these stories to change on a regular basis. So again, as you're working with any local data projects and you want to highlight them, one become a registered user and then share those with us. As we scroll down to the bottom of the page, it gives you information on what the latest updates have been to data sets, what the most popular data sets have been and any new visualizations that have been created and shared. And again, if they're being shared, that means that registered users have created them. Okay, so the other thing I wanted to point out is there's a conceptual change in the old link we talked about data series. Total population is a data series and there were 1,200 of those. How data are organized in new link is a little bit different. Instead of being tracked as individual variables, they're tracked as data sets, collections of variables. While we're looking at the categories here, those categories represent some of those old topic groups and to try to put a visual cue on where some of the data variables might be organized, we've tried to pick some logos that made a little bit of sense and those will help you as we take the next step into exploring the system. So as we look at education, it's the MITRE board that has a government looking building. Employment and income has the dollar sign. Those logos will follow you throughout the link experience. So hopefully becoming more familiar with those will help you in finding the data that you need. So speaking of finding more detailed data, there's a couple of ways you can do it. As you're looking at one of the visualization reports, the blue bar here says if you're interested in finding more detailed data, just click on the data catalog. That's the same as clicking the data link at the top of the page. However, if what you're seeing in this visualization is really what you're interested in, you can view the complete data set and that will take you into the specific data set that has the variables you're looking at. So this is a little different. Clicking on the view complete data set at the bottom is a little different than clicking on data catalog. But let's take a look at the data catalog now. So one of the things to point out is that in your experience at the upper right-hand corner, you'll see sign up and log in. Sign up is again asking you to become a registered user. If you are a registered user and you've logged in, you'll have a slightly different view here. Right now we see 41 data sets because I'm viewing this as just a generic public user. If I were to log in with my user ID and password, I would have over 60 data sets to look at. The same thing is true with all the registered users. You'll get a richer data experience by being a registered user. So coming in, the first thing we'll notice here is the total number of data sets. That's not the total number of variables. So we see here that this is the number of farms by size and the icon here is the same icon that was with the agriculture category page when we first landed on link. So that should give us some indication about the type of data that are there. So we have 41 individual data sets, but an individual data set could have scores of different data items. As we come down the page a little bit, the left-hand side helps you navigate a little bit through all the data sets that are available. First of all, you can sort the data sets. You've probably already noticed that they're not alphabetical by default. They're alphabetical by modification, so we can change by sorting from... It already is modified. Or we can search by the most popular data sets, and this is based on the number of hits to the data set. So we see that census population and housing from link is the most popular right now. I should point out when you see a data set name and it has link and parentheses, that means that was part of the mass migration of data from old link into new link. Now, as that... The big push was to get all of our old data into the new system, but in doing that, we've recognized that we're going to have to change how we're serving data a little bit to improve the user experience. This is part of the whole growth process that we're in right now. So this lets you know that you're looking at a data set that's going to have a lot of variables in it. These may change over time, but we're not going to lose any data. It's just going to be presented in a different way. So that's all that's letting you know. You will see data sets like NC Complete Count Committee over here that don't have link. That lets you know this was data that wasn't in the old link. It's a new data set. Hopefully we'll see a lot more of those in the future. You can also choose to sort your data sets alphabetically. That makes a lot of sense. You have a search window right under filters and you have a big search window at the top. Those certainly work, but I do want to give you a brief warning about searching. The searches right now are only searching for words that are in the descriptions. So it's the brief paragraph, the title of the data set, the brief description under the data set, or the tiles that are right under the data set. These are actually keyword tiles that are loaded by staff members who are uploading data. So if you're looking for a keyword, if you're searching for a concept that's not in a title or in one of these keywords, you may not find it even though the data is actually in the system. This is a challenge we're working with our developers on. Part of it has to do with some of these data sets have so much data in them that if we tried to describe everything, the descriptive text would get so long. It would be too long. So we're considering possibly breaking up some of the data sets, having more of them, or working out some new search algorithms. But for right now, we understand that you're searching, you're only searching the text that's in titles, descriptive text, and keywords. So you'll also notice that if we click into a data set, you'll find some different options before we get into that. Coming down a little bit, under views, what you're seeing here are options for what's available in which data sets. So we'll see Analyze as the first option, and we see 41. Well, 41 is not the number of data items. It's the number of data sets that you can analyze. So you can analyze every data set within New Link, and we'll talk about what analysis means in a little bit. Mapping and Custom View is available in only 19 data sets for Mapping right now and 18 Custom Views. We'll talk about that in a little bit too. In terms of modification, this lets you know which data sets have been updated for those years. You can also take a look by publisher. This is sort of like looking at the browse all link in the old system. So what data series are available by what publishers? You can also do a quick search by a keyword. Clicking these filters or these themes is essentially the same thing as doing a search by U.S. Census Bureau or by the keyword of employment. The theme items, the themes are essentially the logos. So if you're doing a search, if we click Education, you'll just get the themes that have the Education theme on. You'll just get returns on that. And also at the very bottom, you'll see Download Catalogs. These are formats for which you can download everything. The old link, there wasn't really a download feature. I'm glad to say that the new link allows you to download in a lot of different formats. This functionality follows you throughout the data querying process. So as you're creating a query, as you find a data set that you really like, you'll have the ability to pull that data down either in part or in bulk very quickly. Okay, so since we've got agriculture pulled up, let's just go ahead and click that data set to actually enter it. You'll notice at the end of each data set, there are some icons and some words there. This functionality will follow you into the next step, so what it's letting you know is these are the operations that are available for this data set. So clicking Agriculture, now we'll see data. The default is you come into a table view. So the table view just shows you all the data that's available there in no real particular order. So Jones County shows up first, and then you see Year, then you see the variable ID, and then you actually see the value of the data itself. Now you'll notice you don't see the old variable ID number, that legacy number that came from the original link, the mainframe link. We're moving away from that in this system. So if you relied on it heavily in the old system, I'm sorry to say it's not going to be a part of the new system. If it's something that you would like to see come back, please send us a comment. It's not something that we can't do. We just didn't think it was getting as much use as maybe it had originally. So when you see these systems, each one of the fields are sortable. So if we would like to see our geography sorted alphabetically, we can, or if we want to see it sorted by year, or by variable name, or if for some reason you wanted to see value sorts, we can do that. However, the important thing to notice is that the sorts are independent of each other. So if we decide that we want to sort by geography name, it's not going to sort by year or by variable name. It's only going to sort by that individual column. This is just within what we have set here. You will have options to do additional sorting later on. Also what you need, so we've clicked on agriculture. Now we see we're looking at 214,000 records plus. So this is great, and we can see how many different variable, how many different data items are available by the different geographies. So if we're interested in Alamance County, our selection point within this data set has 2160 variables. We also notice that we can create some filters. We can filter by geography. We can filter by year. We can filter by variable name, and each one of those is expandable. So if you want to see more information that's there, we can certainly do that. At the very top, it says no active filters. So as a very beginning when you come into an area, it doesn't make any assumptions about what you're looking for. So it just shows you everything. So if you're thinking about doing a download of the data, you can certainly do a download from here. You can export and get everything from the agriculture file, but that's going to be 214 records. So let's say that we're trying to find some economic information. We'll do a quick query here to look for some agricultural economic information for Granville County. We'll see what their receipts were, and maybe we're doing a trend analysis. So we just want to see all the data. So let's do a filter. We can use the search here or at the top, and we'll search for receipts. So now we've gone from over 200,000 down to 30,000 records. But what kind of receipts are we looking at? There's a lot of options. So we'll come down here and expand. So these are all the link variables that have something to do with receipts that are in the agriculture data set. Well, let's say we want to take a look at... And this lets us know that for total receipts, there are 4,800 data items. But we just want to see items for Granville County. So let's take total receipts, marketing of crops receipts, livestock receipts, and transfer payments. So we've clicked four variables. All of those, including our text search, now show up in the active filters. And now we're down to 19,200 records. So this looks like the data that I'm interested in, but I don't want to see it for all counties. I just want to see it for Granville County. So we can clear our receipts search. We don't need that anymore. So we click and it goes away. And now we can do a search for geography. So let's search for Granville County. So now we're down to 192 records. That's much more manageable. Great. So now if I want to do a sort by year, I can. We start with 1969. We can browse the data a little bit. Yep, that looks like the data I want to see. So if that's what we want, fantastic. At the bottom of the table, you see you have some options. You can share this data table right away. You can embed it as a widget. And you get the code at the bottom that you can copy and paste into any website that you may be working on. Also, if you're really excited about the data and you want to tweet it out to your friends, you have the option of Tweet Facebooking LinkedIn, if you want to put it on your LinkedIn site or if you want to send it out as an email. You can do these functions without being a registered user. That's totally open. But this is very much the type of functionality that you had in the old link. And we know that there's a lot more functionality available today. So let's take a look at the options that are showing up at the top of this table. First of all, information just lets you know the metadata about the data set itself. The data set, not the individual variables. So this lets you know the key words that are associated with this data set. It lets you know who reported the data and it gives you some links to the reporting agencies. Now, if you were a registered user at this point and you were really excited about this data, you could click the bell and you'd get an update whenever this data set was updated. If you were going to reuse this data, you could also let folks know, hey, this is fantastic. I have an annual report that I do that needs to track receipts from farm commodities. So you could grab this data and put it into your report. Every time it was updated, it would update in your report. But you have to be a registered user to do that. So this is what the login part does. It helps you to be a registered user. So metadata is included on the information tab. The table tab shows us the tabular version of the data that we're looking at. The analysis tab is why we're all here, really. This really gets us into the new visualization feature of the open data format. So by default, when we come in, we get a chart that's not too pretty, okay. But we have a lot of options here. So first of all, you'll notice that you have a lot of control over what you're actually charting. It's remembered the data items that you've selected, but it's asking you how you want to see them. So what do we want to see on the X axis? Well, right now, it's showing us the value, the actual data items. But maybe we would rather see the year. Okay, well, that's looking a little more promising. But what's this breakdown stuff here? Let's see that we want to see that by variable. Okay, great. Now we're starting to see something that looks more useful. We're seeing the receipts from the marketing of crops, livestock, transfer payments, and then total marketing. Fantastic. It's cutting it off. It's starting with 1969 and then going to 1981. And we selected more data than that. You can select how many points you actually show. So we can go up to 100, and that cuts us off at 94, or we can go up to 200, and that takes us up to 2017. So these are just visualizations within the system. If you hover over any given point, you actually get the metric for that point. If you decide that what you'd really like to see is a line chart, you can absolutely get that. If you decide that you want to be more colorful, you can pick the color schemes that you want to use or the color for any given variable series. And as you hover over it, you'll get the individual measures. Now we've spent a little time getting to this point, and we could certainly create more detailed charts. You see there are a lot of options that you have to pick from. And depending on the number and the different cross tabulations you may have created within the system, you probably invested a fair amount of time. And you might not want to do that every time you come in and look at the data. So that's the value of being, again, I hate to beat the drum too much, but being a shared user, being a registered user at this point lets you save your data report, save all that structure. So at this point, if we wanted to share it, we'll get to it a little bit later. But if we tried to do a save at this point on the series, it would say that's great, but you have to be a registered user to do it. But you can certainly capture the widget and drop it into a frame on a website, and it would keep what you have right now. It wouldn't remember it for future updates, but it would take the dynamic nature of this chart and put it into whatever you want to put it into. Now if we decide, yeah, this is the absolute right data that I want to be looking at. In fact, I want to be able to compare how Granville County is doing with all the other counties. We can click on the cross-table view. So we'll see here that we have all the data that we wanted for Granville County, but now we've decided that we want to do that cross-county analysis. So we have a couple of options we can go in and start selecting the other counties, or we can just take Granville County out of the active filters. So when we pull that away, now it's saying, okay, well, he's not interested in just looking at Granville, so I'm going to give him the data for all the counties. So now we're not getting the whole agriculture data set. We're just getting the specific variables that we were interested in, but since we didn't specify a year or a county, we're getting all counties in all years. In the old link, you had a cutoff as to how much data you could ask for at a time. That's really not the case in the new version. So you can get as much data for our high-end, more power users. You can get as much data as you want at one time, pretty much. And then from this point, you can export it as a CSV, as a JSON file, or as Excel. We do have some tables that are some data sets that are set up for mapping. Those will also include geospatial information, and those will allow you to export that geospatial information as well. It's not part of every data set right now. We're moving in that direction. But for the data sets that do have the mapping feature there, that's an option for your download. An API is an option for every data set. So if you're working in an API environment and you want to do federated pools of data, that's available for everything that's here. You don't have to go out and input the data. You don't have to worry about downloading it. You can just API reference it, and you've got it. Now, one thing you may have noticed in all of this process is we have the full data name here, but in the old link, you could click on the data name and find out what that data actually meant. The data definitions, the metadata, clicked on the wrong tab. In the data catalog, we can go to the data dictionary. The link data dictionary is here. That is the metadata description for every data variable that's in link. However, the system is really set up to provide data, statistical information, and the data definitions can be very long. So you'll notice if you hover over them, they're pretty long. So we do have the data here. We're experimenting with different ways of joining those data definitions to the data that are already in the system. So does it make sense to have it show up as something that's hoverable like this? Do we want it to show up as an individual column within the data sets? We're still experimenting on that. We'd love to hear your input. So as you're dealing with patrons within the library, as you're nosing around the data, let us know what works best for you because this absolutely is something that we want to make as functional as possible for our end users. So we were just in the agriculture data set. And if you notice in the agriculture set, we have the option of setting a range of years. Again, as I just said, we are experimenting with a couple of different functionalities. So you will notice slightly different functionalities from data set to data set. We'd like to hear what you like and what you don't like so that we can work out that standardization in the next couple of weeks and months. So if that feature is something that you really like, we'll replicate it. But let's take a look at that as something else. While ag data is great, let's take a look at the education data. So we did a search for education and now we see a number of data sets that show up that have education in them somehow. So state comparison showed up because education shows up as a keyword tile underneath it. And the main education data set shows up here. This is a subset of the education data set, but we see that it's in the same theme. So if we go into the education data set here, we notice that we don't see the range of year feature. We do have an old link. We served a variety of data from a number of different geographic types. So we noticed that we have information for townships. We have information for municipalities. We have information for municipal parts. So a municipal part is for a town, a city or town that splits county boundaries. So part of Blowing Rock is in Caldwell County and part is in Wataga County. And we actually have data for each part of that municipality within the education data set. We have information for the total municipality. So we have a total figure for Blowing Rock in town as well as for the different parts. We have data for the state of North Carolina and for census geographies like census tracts and block groups because there is census data in the lake system. So this functionality allows us to say, I'm interested in doing a comparison, but I just want to compare all municipalities or all counties. I don't want to see the rest of those geographies. So here we're looking at just municipalities. So if this is something that's useful to you, we'd like to hear your feedback. If you have recommendations on, we like that functionality, but we'd like to be able to tie that with another functionality that we saw in another data set. We'd really like to know that as well. So please let us know. Going back to the data sets, I want to talk a little bit about mapping because I know Tom is running short on us here. So we see some data sets that have map icons next to them and there's the mapping at the top. Let's take a quick look at what's available for the referencing of mapping. So the same functionality is going to be available through all data sets once we get all the kinks ironed out. But you can either map from creating a query and then saying, yes, I want to show this map. These are the data sets that have already been pre-formatted to support the mapping function. So let's take a look at healthcare professionals. So we can go ahead and select that and this is pulling in data from that data set for all the counties. Now this may be fine to meet your needs if you hover over a given county or click on a county, you'll get a pop-up. There's a number of items in the data set. So there are actually four items that we've mapped. We've mapped the active primary care physicians and there are 25, as of I think this is 17 data. There were 25 mid-level practitioners, 223 registered nurses, and 14 active dentists in Chatham County in 2017. So here we've got a quick map that's just showing a collection of data. We have the ability of being able to go in and change the configuration. We can change color. We can change display features. We can change groups. We can go ahead and... Well, let's do a quick filter on this. So if we want to edit it, we can change color, border types, shapes. But now we want to filter it and say, you know what? Really, all we want to see is just the nurses. We don't want the rest of these data items. So we can type in nurse. So now we see that we're only looking at 100 records because that's only one data item for each county and that's what we want. Sorry, select the 100 counties. And now for Chatham County, it's only showing the one item, the 223 nurses. We don't get the option of seeing the other data. We can go ahead and set some levels in here. I just want to show you the ones that the counties that have less than 50 nurses should be one color. You can create a thematic scale if you'd like. You can name your map and then save. Oh, but we're not a registered user, so it's asking us what we'd like our information to become a registered user. So this functionality, just like with your charts or anything else that you saved, at this point if you're not a registered user, it will prompt you to become one. Now you could grab the widget information and share it that way, but it won't save your work long term. So I'll take us back to the data sets. I encourage everybody just to kind of dive into this and explore. In terms of mapping, we are going to expand into some custom geographies. We definitely want to add the metropolitan statistical areas as they've changed over time. We have the ability to add things like floodplain zones or river basins. Any type of geography that we can get shapefiles for, we can add that functionality into the system. The great thing about the system is that it allows for us to set up automated harvesting and FTP sites so that as an agency creates, if they have an annual report, a monthly report, if they have daily data that comes out, we can set the system up to just grab that data when it's reported and add it to link. So we have the ability to include a lot more data, a lot more timely data up to daily or real-time data into the system that we haven't traditionally had in the past. The question is just going to be how do we display that or how do we provide access to it in a way that's most meaningful? If tabular data is fine for some of the more rapidly turnaround data, then great. Maybe we won't be able to add mapping to that, but we have a lot of potential with this system going forward. We just need to know what data sets would be of interest. The office, once we get to a broader release point on this, we'll be doing some kind of one-on-one meetings with the individual agencies to find out what data they would like to highlight within the link and expand what's there. I can tell you there are a number of state agencies that are actually working towards this direction. The system that we're using, it's an open data format, but it's hosted by a company called Open DataSoft. There are developers that are working with us on this. There are two or three other state agencies that they're working with right now, so they seem to be a popular vendor in this area. They had their first North American assembly meeting or kickoff meeting of users just earlier this week on Tuesday, and it was here in Raleigh because North Carolina is kind of their key hub. Their North American headquarters is in Boston, so they wanted someone in the same time zone, and they're doing a lot of work in the triangle area. If you are using open data as part of your usual work with your library work, the presentation that we did earlier this week featured the link system and what the Chapel Hill Library was doing because they're big users of open data. So if you're using open data, this is a great way that you could leverage your data with what the state's doing to provide an even richer data experience. The Open DataSoft Company, as I mentioned, they just had their kickoff meeting last week, but they're also forming a user group in the area. So anyone that would like to maybe be able to use a SharePoint or a Slack site to have ongoing conversations about future developments in open data and how to make not only link, but other open data resources more usable or more functional in North Carolina, we'd like to take advantage of that. I will be at the NCLA conference, the North Carolina Library Association Conference, in October. The goal is to have a full launch, the grand launch of link before then. Both versions of the new version of link and the old version of link are being maintained, but the old version of link will probably be sunsetted sometime before the end of the year. We don't have a firm date right now, but we hope to have all the functionality and much more continuity of function across datasets for new link by the October meeting of NCLA. So I hope what you've heard a little bit about today, you'll be able to see more functionality, more bells and whistles in October. So I hope you'll be a part of that meeting. And at that point, I think I'll just stop talking at you, but I'd like to take a step back and field any questions y'all may have. Thank you so much, Bob. This is great. I'll give people time to type in questions. One of the questions I had, we've worked with our county data manager, we've been very supportive of the data for it all, for the county. And I was just wondering if there's any discussion with individual counties about making platforms compatible or crosswalking away, but what should you... Yeah, there actually has been. In fact, the U.S. Census Bureau has been moving towards an open data format for their data for some time now. And they have been holding some workshops, hack shops, using local government open source data in conjunction with census data to try to serve local data needs. So about, I think it was maybe three years ago, they had a hack shop in Wilmington using local emergency response data to kind of demo how open data would serve an emergency response situation. So they are actively doing a lot of that work, and I only see more of that coming in the future. Yeah, no, it's definitely... It's interesting that the unfortunate part it seems like not every county, but a lot of counties are on different systems. They're not always... Right, and I do know that locally, the city of Durham and the county of Durham have an open data portal where only more and more data is going into that. The town of Cary has a lot of open data. Wilmington does. So I really think it's the wave of the future. It's just a matter of how is the data connected and then how can it be combined with other data sources. The nice thing about this is it prevents you from having to go out and hunt down either a hard copy PDF report and then re-enter it. You can always kind of find the latest data in a format that's readily consumable. Great. All right, are there any questions that we have? I do see a question on the chat box. I just closed my window so I could see the chat questions. Can you ask if we could provide projections down to the municipal level? I do know that for our office, the state demographer does projected estimates of population by age, race, sex, and Hispanic origin for the state and for the counties. He does not project information for municipalities. And the reason for that is that municipal boundaries are much more dynamic than county and state boundaries. We really don't know what annexation or incorporations are going to look like. So for that purpose, he just certifies the latest estimates and doesn't project. I imagine that same limitation is probably in place for most other agencies. The Census Bureau does do some projecting for metro areas, but it's important to remember those metro areas while they are named after municipalities. They're actually made up of counties. So it's easier to project that county data than it is municipal data. I'm not seeing any coming in to me, but Bob, do you want to share your contact information one more time? I had it on the slide, which I couldn't get to pop up, but I will share the slide, and again, there are only four or five of them. The last page of my slides have my contact information. So my email address is bob.coats. At OSBM.