I fixed a couple of things after the last post and now we can use motion charts to visualize all the Association of Research Library statistics using R and googleVis. I’ve got a small example below, set up so that it’s showing four particularly interesting things to start, and you can just press play to see something good:
along the y-axis: TOTSTU, total number of students at the universities (see Principles of Membership to see what it means to be in the ARL for a library and for its parent university; serious research will be happening there)
size of the circles: TOTEXP, total expenditures of the libraries
(Again, if you’re viewing this through an RSS feed and not seeing a fancy graph with a lot of coloured circles on it, come to this page and try out the motion chart.)
Notice how the green (private American) universities are lower down because they generally have fewer students. The shape of the line they make is closer to the x-axis because they generally have more faculty per student. The yellow (American state universities) are angled up much higher because they generally have more students and fewer faculty per student. The blue Canadian universities are mixed in with the yellow ones.
Pennsylvania State is a big outlier in the American universities, far up and to the right with lots of faculty and lots of students. U of Toronto is the outlier among Canadian universities—it’s the biggest in this country. When the graph stops in 2009 there are three large green circles with just over 2,000 faculty, running up the centre of the chart: Yale, Harvard and Columbia.
A related pair of variables to chart is TOTSTU vs PRFSTF (professional staff). A really interesting pair is EXPSER (expenditures for current serials) vs SERPUR (current serials purchased). EXPSER/SERPUR is how much a library spends per year on serials, and the motion chart of the last twenty years of EXPSER to SERPUR shows how crazy all this has become and why serials purchasing is such a problem for libraries now.
To keep this page small enough that my CMS could deal with it (there’s about 300K of data embedded in it) I’m only showing a very small subset of all available variables:
FAC: instructional faculty
TOTSTU: total full-time student enrolment
TOTEXP: total library expenditures
VOLS: volumes held
SERPUR: current serials purchased
TOTCIRC: total circulations
PRFSTF: professional staff (librarians and others)
TOTSTF: total professional and support staff
EXPMONO: expenditures for monographs
EXPSER: expenditures for current serials
SALPRF: professional salaries
Using the code above it’s easy to recreate this chart at home. If you do, you can leave out the select bit and it will graph all the variables. As well, the subset command picks out three kinds of institutions and leaves out national libraries like Library and Archives Canada and the Library of Congress, which in many ways aren’t comparable to university libraries, but you can leave out the subsetting to see what happens. To visualize the entire ARL data set, run this:
> install.packages('googleVis')
> arl <- read.csv("http://www.miskatonic.org/files/arl-1989-2009.csv")
> canada <- subset(arl, REGION == 10)
> canada.toplot <- canada[, c(1, 3, 39, 41, 42, 44, 55, 57, 66, 67, 70)]
> M <- gvisMotionChart(canada.toplot, idvar="INAM", timevar="YEAR")
> plot(M) # to plot it locally
> cat (M$html$chart, file="chart.html") # so I could include it here
The variable names are what the ARL uses. They are:
TOTCIRC = total circulation
PRFSTF = number of professional staff
NPRFSTF = number of non-professional staff
TOTSTF = total staff
TOTSAL = total salaries
TOTEXP = total expenditures
TOTSTU = total number of students
GRADSTU = number of graduate students
FAC = number of faculty
Try starting off with TOTSTU against FAC or TOTSTU against TOTCIRC, There are lots of other variables that could be plotted but to keep it manageable I just picked out some I thought would be interesting. Try turning on the log view and seeing how that changes things.
(It’s funny how Library and Achives Canada jumps in at the end out of nowhere with a very large number of staff. Did they just recently join the ARL? Is my data wrong?)
The Drupal theme Zen, that is, not the branch of Buddhism. Earlier tonight I used drush to do some upgrades to this site and in the process the page layout got completely buggered. I use a theme based on Zen (a sub-theme, as it’s called), and it broke. Rob Casson told me that the Zen theme people had made some big changes and it turned out that upgrading Zen from 6.x-1.x to 6.x-2.x pretty much requires that you redo your subtheme. So I did that and things are more or less back to where they were.
I might migrate to WordPress. Drupal is overkill for what I do here. I’ve had the same theme for six years for one WordPress blog and never had the slightest problem with it, either.
(Photo by Matt Critchlow of me “talking on videophone” to Bess Sadler. Matt and Dan Suchy were also part of the workshop and talked about two projects they’d worked on at UCSD, one of which they wrote up with Lia Friedman for the Code4Lib Journal: Using an Agile-based Approach to Develop a Library Mobile Website.)
We made some cuts and revisions to the script but the biggest change was the addition of new thoughtful and well-informed video clips from Bess Sadler as my fellow systems librarian and Sophie Bury, Patti Ryan and Lisa Sloniowski as reference and instruction librarians saying what they want from IT people. Everything is up in our institutional repository:
fancy PowerPoint slides that Adam made with embedded audio and video; won’t work on old versions of PowerPoint
It’s all under a Creative Commons license Attribution-Share Alike license, which means you can perform the play yourself at your own library! If you do, please send a picture.
Most of the cats I saw in New Orleans were moving pretty slowly or zonked out having a snooze. It was hot. I had a fantastic time. Thanks, New Orleans.
It’s part of a series at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast, a blog about children’s books. The interview is profusely illustrated with pictures of my mother’s books and art and studio and it’s well worth a look.
Here’s a stop-motion video (no sound) of her drawing Bear from the popular Bear and Mouse books:
My fellow York University librarian Sarah J. Coysh and I have a paper just out in Library Hi Tech vol. 29 no. 2: “Usability Testing of VuFind at an Academic Library” (DOI: 10.1108/07378831111138189). It does what’s on the tin: it’s about usability testing of VuFind as implemented as the York University Libraries catalogue.
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of an academic library’s implementation of a discovery layer (VuFind 1.0 RC1) as a next-generation catalogue, based on usability testing and an online survey.
Design/methodology/approach – Usability tests were performed on ten students (eight undergraduates, two graduates), asking a set of 14 task-oriented questions about the customized VuFind interface. Task completion was scored using a simple formula to generate a percentage indicating success or failure. Changes to the interface were made based on resulting scores and on feedback and observations of users during testing. An online survey was also run for three weeks, to which 75 people responded. The results were analyzed, compared and cross-tested with the findings of the usability testing.
Findings – Both the usability testing and survey demonstrated that users preferred VuFind’s interface over the classic catalogue. They particularly liked the facets and the richness of the search results listings. Users intuitively understood how to use the deconcatenated Library of Congress Subject Headings. Despite the discovery layer’s new functionality, known journal title searching still presents a challenge to users and certain terms used in the interface were problematic.
Practical implications – It is hoped that the findings will assist implementers of VuFind and other next-generation catalogues to improve their own systems. The questions add to the body of knowledge about usability testing of library catalogues.
Originality/value – No previous papers have been published documenting VuFind usability testing. Not only will the findings be relevant, not just to VuFind, but they will also add to the growing body of literature on next-generation catalogues.
1) People use the average Joe’s poor mathematics as a way to control, exploit, and numerically fuck him over.
2) Mathematics is the subject in which, regardless of what the authorities tell you is true, you can verify every last iota of truth, with a minimum of equipment.
I like this quote:
I’m trying to get across that if you are highly motivating, if you have a high degree of fire and “Fuck yeah!” and “What, that’s impossible, but true!”, you can get students to express interest in theorems named after dead Hungarians.
See also: Edupunk and Libpunk. And maybe listen to “Marquee Moon” by Television.
Short note that I added Will Self’s Walking to Hollywood and Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Deathgate Cycle to Fictional Footnotes and Indexes. I’m always interested in hearing about more.
Miskatonic University Press
