Godmar Back and Annette Bailey, Virginia Tech

Practically all libraries today provide web-based discovery systems to their users; users discover items and peruse or check them out by clicking on links. Unlike the traditional transaction of checking out a book at the circulation desk, this interaction is largely invisible. We have built a system that records user’s interaction with Summon in real-time, processes the resulting data with minimal delay, and visualizes it in various ways using Google Charts and using various d3.js modules, such as word clouds, tree maps, and others.

These visualizations can be embedded in web sites, but are also suitable for projection via large-scale displays or projectors right into the ‘Learning Spaces’ many libraries are converted into. The goal of this talk is to share the technology and advocate the building of a cloud-based infrastructure that would make this technology available to any library that uses a discovery system, rather than just those who have the technological prowess for developing such systems and visualizations in-house.

LibFX aka Discovering Discovery