This is a presentation provided by Shawn Averkamp of the New York Public Library at a NISO Training Thursday Event on Feb 25, 2016

1. GitHub for Open Data
NYPL’s Public Domain Data Release
Shawn Averkamp
@saverkamp
Manager, Metadata Services
NYPL Labs

2. Overview
● Background on Public Domain release
● Challenges and options for sharing open data
● Benefits of using GitHub and organizational accounts for
open data
● What you need to learn -- the minimum!

4. http://publicdomain.nypl.org

5. http://publicdomain.nypl.org

6. https://github.com/NYPL-publicdomain/data-and-utilities

7. https://github.com/NYPL-publicdomain/data-and-utilities/blob/master/items/pd_items_1.csv
public domain data -- CSV serialization

8. https://github.com/NYPL-publicdomain/data-and-utilities/blob/master/items/pd_items_1.ndjson
public domain data -- NDJSON serialization

9. other options for open data
● Download link from local website (store data on local server or 3rd-
party cloud service)
● Data repository (institutional or third-party, like figshare or datahub)

10. https://git-lfs.github.com/
pros:
- serve large files
seamlessly
cons:
- cost (up to 1GB free, but
$/GB storage and bandwidth >
1GB)
- software required

11. https://github.com/NYPL-publicdomain/data-and-utilities/tree/master/items
solution:
- split files into multiple files below GitHub’s 100MB size limit
- offer sample Javascript and Python code for joining files
- also offered sample script for batch downloading images

12. https://government.github.com/community/
benefits -- existing audience

13. benefits -- version control

14. benefits -- user interaction

15. benefits -- user interaction

16. benefits -- easy to update

17. benefits -- organizational accounts
https://github.com/NYPL-publicdomain/nypl-publicdomain.github.io

18. learning curve -- the minimum
Basic Git skills:
● Creating a GitHub repo
● Cloning a repo
● Committing changes
● Pushing changes to GitHub
● Pulling current code from GitHub
● Accepting (or closing) a pull request
● Markdown

19. README.md

20. GitHub-flavored Markdown

22. Thank you!
email: shawnaverkamp@nypl.org
github: https://github.com/saverkamp
this presentation: http://bit.ly/GitHubforNYPLopendata