About Collection View

Why Collection View?

Collection View is in part an extension of my work on Search Workbench. Just as that project enables one to visualize PubMed results, Collection View allows you to visualize your Library of Congress searches so that you can get a better sense of what they are doing. Importantly, you can also directly compare searches to one another — facilitating the process of fine-tuning a search strategy.

How it works

Collection View summarizes your search results by plotting them on a couple of different data visualizations. In the first, raw numbers for each format are visualized as a stacked bar graph. In the second, searches using Boolean logic are visualized using a Venn diagram. This view is also available when you're comparing multiple searches. Finally, the proportions of items in your search for each format and each century are compared to the baselines for the collection as a whole.

For more details, check out my talk at Code4Lib 2021. Slides at osf.io. Video on YouTube.

Technologies

Collection View is put together with JavaScript and jQuery. Search results are fetched with the Library of Congress's API.

Google Charts is used to draw the line charts, and Ben Fredrickson's venn.js overlay of Mike Bostock's d3.js performs the set visualization. Responsive layout is made easier with Bootstrap.

You can find the source code for this application at GitHub.