Bibliographic Information Visualization and AnalysisChitra Madhwacharyula

Colleen Whitney

Lulu Guo

Background

California Digital Library serves the entire UC system: more than 35 million bibliographic records in the combined catalog

Need to be able to find patterns in this data in order to develop better services and tools

Project Goal

Facilitate exploration of items in bibliographic collections using brushing and linking techniques

Key concepts of interest Circulation patterns by general subject area Circulation patterns by time The relationship of circulation to holdings

Targeted Audience

California Digital Library Staff Characteristics

Develop tools and programs to serve all UC campuses

Not involved with day-to day workings of the libraries, but many are ex-librarians

One related project: improving the quality of information retrieval

Related Work

PaperLens Overview of collection along defined axes Ability to zoom in and see patterns within a subset Ability to highlight an item and see details,

additional patterns within the collection

Related Work

Dataset

Sample data (from UCLA) 320 randomly selected items Related circulation data Mid-1999 - mid-2005 All these items circulate (which is only true for

about 25% of the entire collection) This small set is being used to test the general

visualization approach; we will be working with a much larger set eventually

Our Prototype

Visual Components

Bar Graphs Small multiples segment data by subject Bars indicate number of circulation transactions,

by time Scatter plots

More detail, new dimension within subject/time Item Detail

Temporal pattern at item level

The Software Debate

Tableau Small multiples but no brushing and linking

Spotfire Brushing and linking, but no small multiples

Our Choice JpGraph: PHP graphics package backed by a

MySQL database

Demo

Issues Size of dataset

Complexity of metadata

Data transformations

What sampling technique to use ?

Limitations of JpGraph

Future Work

Expand the dataset

Make interface more intuitive Support filtering by subject and time at the outset Make timeline presentation of item-level

circulation pattern Solicit and incorporate feedback from target

audience

Questions ?