 So, our speaker for today is Anne Marshall and she has 11 years of experience as an academic librarian and was most recently the subject liaison to the political science department at the University of Rochester. She has provided computer training and support to upstate rural public libraries as a part of the Gates Foundation grant. She is co-author of what an experience library staff participation in ethnographic research and is a former chair of LPSS. So, Anne, thank you very much for joining us today. And I'm going to hand it over to you. Thanks, Linda. Welcome. Thank you all for being here today. So, there are a couple of resources available associated with this presentation today. First the slides and also a resource list. And I've broken down this presentation into four parts. And then as time allows, there's some more resources at the end of the presentation. The place we're going to start is with some interactive tool, some math, which seems very apropos for environmental resources. And in this first section, you know, kind of my thinking is, well, you know, I've got an undergraduate who wants to do a project and doesn't know where to start. So, that's kind of my pitch for this first part. And then for the second part, I'm really going to focus on the data sets, how can I identify and download some environmental data sets. Thirdly, I'm going to take a look at a couple examples from the scholarly literature. And, essentially, that's the way I tend to find data most of the time and look at who's published on the topic and find the data that way. And then finally, I have some resources that are more about kind of things that are going on on campus and some curriculum ideas. And then finally, I'm going to focus on the interactive tools. So, the one that I spent the most time with was the EnviroMapper, which comes from this EnviroFac data warehouse. And to get started with this, it's brilliantly simple. The zip code, or other geographic information, and I did that, and I was given this very nice map. The zip code I chose just to show you the sense of what you're looking at here is Mount Morris area, which is about 30, 40 minutes south of Rochester, New York. I wanted to point out this basemath link, which gives you a full variety of different views to consider. The way that I found was most useful to get into the information and to get a nice kind of visualization of it is to search EnviroFac and specifically to search by program. And if you do that, you'll get this nice graphic at the left-hand side that lists the various programs. And you can see we've already got some very basic kind of statistical information here. This is telling us that in this mapped area, there are 140 sites that are connected with hazardous waste, 16 sites for toxic releases, and so on and so forth. Then the next thing I tried in here was to add data. So you can sort of add supplementary layers. And you've got a variety of options, places, transportation, water features, and so on. I went ahead and added school. And then I also took a look at the water feature. I found that if I added water bodies and streams, I would get a bit overwhelmed. So I chose impaired waterways. And so now you can see with that graphic pool and also for the impaired waterways. So what I did next, let me go back, is as you can see, we've got all of these blue eyes in circle for really every single indicator on this map. And so if you click on those, you're going to get a lot more information. I did that for impaired water bodies. So just let us know that impaired water bodies are those that have excess fluidity and are not clean enough to support recreational use. So then the next thing I did is I went back to this left-hand program data. And I chose just one of them, the hazardous waste sites. Those were added, and you can see they're now indicated on the map in green. And if you hover over, you will, at least for some of them, for the ones with numbers, one here that I chose, Kelly Logan. And so the idea here, kind of from an undergraduate perspective, is to kind of think, well, what kinds of questions might this be generating? And why does the EPA collect data from Kelly Motors? And here I have, I just Googled them. And so maybe for an undergraduate this may kind of provoke some ideas. Then I also went into the eye for hazardous waste. I thought this was useful in that, you know, we can kind of get connected to the policy dimension of this issue. And it's helpful to think about why the EPA is collecting the data that it is collecting. And so this is telling us that this particular information that is collected has been done so under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. So specifically that legislation or that regulation requires data to be collected in connection with those that generate and support treats for and dispose of hazardous waste. On that previous page, there was a link where you could go look up by facilities. And that worked. I personally found this website to be a little bit more intuitive and that there was more information. So here we can search again by this code. So I went ahead and did that. You can see we get the same visual information. And here at the right-hand side, we're now getting information about the extent to which these various entities are in compliance or not in compliance with the regulations. In fact, you can see that we've got two facilities here with violations in the last three years. And if you scroll down, you can get much more detailed reports. So here, for example, we have the Mount Morris Dairy Farm, which had an issue with not being in compliance. And you can go into these reports and take a look at what some of the issues potentially are. So I went back and searched by Kelly Motors. And this certainly has this experience as well, where you may not get a lot of information, but you find, as it's listed here at the bottom of the screen, that there was no violations. So it looks like Kelly Motors is doing or has done what the EPA has asked them to do. And so I throw in a slide here, LiI, which many of you may know about, but just again to make that connection between the data and the legislation. And the reminder that when you encounter things that, you know, what the heck does this mean, that a resource like this can be very, very useful to put the data in context. This next tool, EPA and my environment, works in a similar way. You can put in locations. And as an example for this one, I searched this time by county. This is a little comparative analysis I did. I searched by Monroe County, which is where we are in Rochester, New York. And then I, for comparison, I searched by Los Angeles County. And you can see just visually here with the green and the yellow, that we've got some differences between the two locations. I've just blown up some of the data here so that it's a little bit easier to read. So Los Angeles County has over 2,000 hectic releases in Monroe County. We've got about 188. You can see the big differences between the ozone level between the particulates about three times as much. It's possible to just very quickly do some kind of interesting comparisons by location. They also have a My Health tool here. And so again, I did a comparison between Monroe County and Los Angeles County. I thought it was interesting that in Monroe County, even though with all those differentials, we actually had a double the level of benzene as compared to Los Angeles benzene. So that was, I thought that was kind of interesting. And then I threw in this slide from the census because it kind of has been, again, providing context to undergraduates. It's not, it's likely that one of the reasons for these big differences is check it out the population density. Not surprisingly, it's much, much higher in Los Angeles County. So it may be that in Los Angeles County that their ecological footprint is much smaller in Monroe County, that would take a bit more research to figure out. The other screen I wanted to, or a resource I wanted to point out was that the EPA has a number of apps for smartphones on their site. Here is a portal to 290 apps about the environment. So there's lots of stuff to experiment with here. That is the end of that first section. It's actually getting into the data. In the environmental tool, there is a download option. What was going on? And we had a question about my health tool feed. Is my health tool allow you to collect health data in the environmental section? The first thing I wanted to show you is just to take a look at some of the reports that are posted. And so they have one that they recommended right up front here. You know, I'm trying to kind of do some comparable data stuff to what we looked at from the map. So here we're given both Excel file at the top. And then we're also given PDF at the bottom of the page. I took a look at the one focus on where you live. Just a quick tip I wanted to point out for these Excel files. It turned out when you open this up, the default page is the note page. At first I was like, is this all there is? But if you go down to the, you know, this is an Excel thing. You know, I've got a bunch of other tables in here that you get to buy the options at the bottom of the Excel screen. That was important in this instance to take a look at. The next thing that I looked at, which I think is useful for this particular example, but will be useful for other examples as well, is that the EPA does let you create your own customized data set. You know, I'm familiar with like the IMF and World Bank tools. Maybe not quite as sophisticated and powerful as those tools, but there's still explaining data in here that you can compile into your own customized table. So this first one is FRS data. And that is focused on facilities. So like we were looking at for the hazardous waste sites. For step one, the first thing to say or ask you to do here is to look through. And you have to choose between one of these types of information. You can see we've got things organized by SIT codes, SIT codes, program coordinates. I tried a couple of these. I personally found that one at the top to just seem like it had a bunch of variables in it. So I tried that one. So after choosing your options, which of the tables you want to look at, then it comes up and gives you all of your variables. I thought this indicator at the top for not, you can see in red, do not select the column located directly above if you select this column. I think what they're telling us here is this is just querying, this was maybe an access database. So if we want the count feature, we shouldn't also select this other feature. And so I just, what I did here was search some kind of basic location and facility information. And then if you scroll down, you can see there's a number of other variables as well. I'll just draw your attention to one here at the bottom. Because they seem the most kind of meaty in terms of being in a substantive variable. There's one here about the ozone. I chose one about particulate matters, how much stuff is in the air. They tell you here it comes from the air green book. And so now we're on to step three. So I chose my general area, broad category that I wanted. And I chose my specific variable. And now I'm able to narrow it down. At first I chose here, you can see I just chose New York. And then I chose to output to CSV file. However, when I did that, I went above their maximum result list of 100,000 rows. So then I had to go back. So I just to keep it simple, I narrowed it down to this code. I got a very manageable table when I did that. And you can see that for this particular set of locations, I didn't actually have data. For this EM25 2006 area name. So it looks to me like that means we didn't have... This was not a location where there was that particular issue. Okay, so having gone through those three steps, it looked to me like that kind of customized search is available for a variety of different types of data that the EPA offers. Under the air category, we could do a customized search for greenhouse gas data. Same for water discharge permits, toxins, and also radiation. It is a kind of option and process that seems at least somewhat similar across these different types of data. Also, if you scroll down from this introductory information, you get an annotation about the data itself and what you'll find in that section. Another thing that seems potentially useful from the EPA's website was the data finder. I should also mention here that there are options to search across. You can see here that there's lots. Kind of the scenario I was considering was, let's say I don't know what I'm looking for. And so one could certainly search if you've got a particular specific topic or collection of types of things that you're interested in finding. I will say that as I start to play around with some of these links in here, it looks like some of the links may be the one I tried. It looks like either it was a glitch or a couple of links may mean updating. In other words, that was my experience. So the next way I tried to get into some of this data was data.gov. Some of you may be quite familiar with this. I believe this website went live in 2009 and then got a new interface in 2010. So it's still somewhat new and it's really grown exponentially in terms of the number of data sets that are here. The one that I experimented with was ecosystem. And you can see they recommend some data sets to take a look at. The one I tried was the Biodiversity Resource Hub. And again, we're taking to a map. To make sense, we're looking at environmental data. We're given a map as a way to get into the data. There's a lot one could spend time with here. I just gave you a URL to a PowerPoint that I thought did. And I seem to do a nice kind of overview of how to navigate through this particular site. They also tell you in that PowerPoint much of the data for that project you can find from this source. They recommend, as you can see, there's 14,000 data sets here. So that's another resource to know about. So then I came back to data.gov and I said, okay, let's take a look at energy. We'll also then take you to a variety of options, including data. And there are 413 data sets that you can get to through the Department of Energy's Data Catalog. Okay, let's jump into searching the scholarly literature. Like I said earlier, this is the way that I typically look for data. So I'll give you a couple examples about how I've gone about that. So I just, you know, here's a search from an EBSCO database doing academic search premier here. You know, I think even faculty and graduate students don't often search like this. You know, as librarians, we're able to do these sophisticated searches, which can lead us to some excellent data resources. I threw in the state keyword there because I was trying to think about, well, how can we come up with some comparative data across data? So here's one that was good to me, scaling, you know, two emissions in U.S. urban areas. And of course, if we just flip through the pages of the article until we get to the methods section, they tell us here right in the first sentence where their dataset comes from. It comes from this thing called Project Vulkan. And of course, if we just Google Project Vulkan, up comes the dataset. And I thought it was kind of interesting here to see this is a project that is constituted on Arizona State University's website. But in some respects, it's government data in that it's not created by government entities, but it's funded by both, in this example, by both NASA and DOE. So that's one example. I also did a Google Star example. I actually searched in this one for the name of the agency. One of my little tricks I like to use is to actually search for the term table. I figure, you know, if I pull up an article with that 20 tables in it, or the table is mentioned in the text of the article, maybe I'm a bit more likely to get some really nice data-rich articles. I picked out one about greenhouse gas emissions. And for this one, I just went straight to the bibliography. There's the annual energy outlook, how available that data is online. If we Google for it, the 2015 report is available, both in PDF and Excel. If we look around a little bit more, we can see that they also have a PDF archive. A couple of tips about remembering. We get a lot of information just researching scholarly articles. And next, I wanted to show you some resources focused on college and university campuses. As a way of thinking about, you know, what's happening on our own campus, where as librarians, might we do outreach or target our services around government information and data? And then also, you know, what's happening on other campuses? And how might we make connections to build upon our own programming and offering? The first resource, some of you may be familiar with this, is that the Princeton Review has a guide to green colleges. They have, this is just one example, nice write-up about each institution listed within the guide. And also has just some, you know, information that is in all of the existing guides. And then they add in some information, the physical information that is specifically on environmental issues on campus. So this is, there's a lot of really nice rich information in this guide. You know, another way kind of into this topic is to actually, you know, look at what the NSF is funding and an entire environmental sustainability program within the NSF. You know, of course this is useful for us to know about for our faculty and also, you know, a way to figure out what projects are going on now that it's both using available data and also will be generating data. I also just pulled up a couple examples related to specific things that are going on various campuses. So this is an example of a syllabus. And I thought this one was particularly useful in that it's a class that you can see focused on research and focused on environmental research. And this particular course is for upper-level majors and they, you know, they give a nice description of kind of what they're expecting their undergraduates to do in a semester-long course. And then this other, this next slide, I really enjoyed looking at this guide, how you can see through this guide that there's a connection between the assignments and then between the resources that we put together around the class. So I thought this was just another nice example for thinking about, you know, how to make the connection between the curriculum, between what we do as librarians and all of the resources. And that is the end of the formal presentation. So are there any other questions at this point? An international resource that has been recommended and is quite impressive. Is this the World Resources Institute? What I liked about their offerings is, again, they have a very rich collection of data visualization tools that are then also paired with data sets. This is just an example of one of them where you can visually see coral reefs that are considered at threat. I can just very quickly show you how that works. You can see that they've coded different areas by color. And then here you can see in this visual at the right-hand side of the screen that when you've got the blue, the clear color that's considered at low risk. But then as you move up to the more intensely red or black colors that's considered at most risk. And so the area that I chose to look at was south of Florida. You get a very nice visual here to get a sense of what some of the issues might be. And then you can go back in and you have data in various formats that you can then use in Google Earth and other applications. One of the things about environmental issues, China comes to mind. I thought this site was also rich and useful in terms of this offering. And it's just one example. And I thought what was interesting about this is that you see the same kind of issue about trying to get a sense of what collecting the data, what is the potential oversight with what they call supervision records. Even in a very politically different environment than in the U.S. I thought that that was a useful comparison. And here's just, this link is on your list of resources that give some background about this particular data set. Here's an example from the European Environment Agency. They have a number of data sets. The one that I looked at was nitrates and riverings. The question earlier in the presentation was about more regional data. And actually in this, for this data, that's exactly what they've done here. They've given signs of broader categories to the data. And in terms of looking at the specific zip codes, again, there's a data set that goes along with the math. One can keep going and going with these resources. Some others that I thought were particularly interesting intellectually, but also to make a really clear connection to everyday life is the soil survey. There are interactive features of this. So I haven't done it here, but you can see at the bottom of the screen there's four basic steps you can go to. Many of you are probably familiar with the National Conference of State Legislatures. I just wanted to point out that this also is an excellent place to go to see the environmental status of various legislation across the country on a state-by-state level. So I've just shown you here 2013 Efficient Building Legislation as just one example. A number of resources focused on water, unsurprisingly. So here's the website about Watershed, the USGS. What's so great about this site is that you can get real-time data, flood data, drought data. There's lots of things one can do there. We have just the end of the slide. Are there questions?