Students now have a new tool for accessing, analyzing and sharing swaths of data from a wide variety of academic disciplines with the University library system's new partnership with dataZoa, a universal access tool for data series on the Web.
The service is what Leading Market Technologies Chairman Jay Kemp Smith calls a "lingua franca" for assessing data. "It’s like a Twitter for numbers.”
The $12,000 subscription was funded by the Batten School and Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, and allows users to embed charts and figures from datasets across the web and have them update automatically, Center Director William Shobe said.
“Essentially it provides you with a little tool you can use to drag from a series on a web page onto your dataZoa account," Shobe said. "Once you do that, you will always have the most up-to-date information.”
Smith said the program is intended to assist students working in research projects or aggregating data.
“A user can create tables and charts and dashboards that can be sent off to different phones and saved on the homescreen," Smith said. "They can open it and see display of the updates of current data."
Shobe said the product will help students ensure the data they are using is current and accurate.
“The whole purpose of having a tool like this is to lower the cost of gathering data and keeping it up to date," Shobe said. "It seems like it might really be helpful to people around the University."
The University looked into other options before subscribing to dataZoa, looking for servers that would allow for data collection of up-to-date information, along with the ability to produce graphs which could be embedded on websites and webpages.
“We couldn’t find any other firms that provided this set of services," Shobe said. "What we’re doing this year is experimenting with it."
The University libraries will evaluate the usefulness of the service at the end of the subscription through usage statistics, data librarian Summer Durrant said.
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