I spent the majority of this week continuing to work for the Books and Borrowing project.  I added in images of both the Hunterian and Inverness Kirk Sessions library register pages, as these had not yet been integrated.  I then began working on the library ‘Facts and Figures’ page and added in the API endpoints and processing of library statistics, which now appear in a ‘summary’ section at the top of the page, as you can see for the Chambers library in the following screenshot:

We may need to include some further explanation of the above.  The number of borrowing records does not match the numbers split by gender, which may be caused by some borrowing records not having an associated borrower or others having more than one associated borrower.  Also as you can see a borrowing record in this library has an erroneous year, making it look like the borrowing records stretch into the distant future of 18292.

Beneath the summary are a series of ‘top ten’ lists, featuring the top ten borrowed books, authors and most prolific borrowers, both overall and further broken down by borrower gender, as you can see below:

These all link through to search results for the item in question.  Note that we once again face the issue of numbers here reflecting volumes borrowed while the search results count borrowing records, which can include any number of volumes.  I’m going to have a serious think about what we can do about this discrepancy as it is bound to cause a lot of confusion.  There is also something very wrong with the author figures that I need to investigate.  I think the issue is authors can be associated with any level of book record and I suspect authors in this list are getting counted multiple times.

There are also issues caused by the data still being worked on while the Solr cache and other cached data become outdated.  I spent quite a while on Tuesday trying to figure out why a book holding wasn’t appearing where it should or with the expected number of borrowings until I realised the data in the CMS had been updated (including the initial letter of the book title) while the cache hadn’t.

I then moved onto working on some visualisations.  I created a borrower occupations donut chart as described in the requirements document.  This chart shows the distribution of borrower occupations across library borrowers in a two-level pie chart with top-level occupations in the middle and these then subdivided into secondary level occupations in the outer ring.  Note that I haven’t further split ’Religion and Clergy’ > ‘Minister/Priest’ into its third level occupations as it is the only category that has three levels and it would have made the visualisation too complicated (both to develop and to comprehend in the available space).  Instead the individual ‘minister / priest’ categories are amalgamated into ‘minister / priest’.

The charts are a nice way to get an overall picture of the demographics of the selected library and also to compare the demographies of different libraries.  For example, Chambers has a very broad spread of occupations:

Whereas Advocates (as you’d expect) is more focussed:

You can hover over each segment to view the title of the occupation and the percentage of borrowers that have the occupation.  You can also click on a segment to perform a search for the occupation at the library in question.  You should bear in mind that a borrower can have multiple (or no) occupations so the number of borrowers and the number of occupations will be different.  The next thing I’ll do is create a further donut chart showing the number of borrowings per occupation, but I’ll leave that to next week.

I also thought some more about the thorny issue of number of borrowings versus number of borrowing records.  What I think I’ll try and do is ensure that the only number that is shown is the number of associated borrowing records.  I’ll need to experiment with how (or if) this might work, which I will leave until next week.

I also devoted some time to setting up the website for Ophira Gamliel’s new AHRC project.  I created several mockups of possible interface designs including a few different header images based on photographs of manuscripts that the project will analyse.  Ophira and Co-I Ines Weinrich picked the version they liked best and I then applied this to the live site.  I also worked on a static map of the area the project will focus on.  I created this by initially creating an interactive map using the lovely Stamen Watercolor basemap and then I used Photoshop to add other labels and to fade out areas the project is not focussing on.  The map still needs some work but here is an initial version:

I spent a bit of time working for the DSL, responding to a couple of queries from Pauline Graham about Google Analytics.  Pauline wondered whether it we could find search terms that people had entered that found no results in GA, but after some research I don’t think it would be possible as the page that GA will log is the same whether there are results or not.  We’d have to update the site structure to maybe load a different page (with the search terms in the URL) when there are no results and then we’d be able to isolate these page hits in GA.  However, we can limit the list of page stats in GA to a specific page and then order by number of views, which may give us some idea of which searches find nothing.  After selecting ‘Pages and screens’ in ‘Engagement’ pressing the blue plus in the results table header opens a pop-up  and selecting ‘Page / Screen’ then ‘Landing page + query string’ allows you to add a new column featuring the page URL.  Then above the table in the search area (with the magnifying glass) enter ‘/results/’ to limit the data to the search results page.  You can update the ‘rows per page’ and press the arrow next to ‘views’ to order by views from least to most.

I also spent some time on the Speech Star project this week, updating the ExtIPA charts to add in ‘sound name’ and ‘context’ to the metadata and updating the website to ensure this new information is displayed alongside the videos.  I also added in new metadata for the IPA charts, but for the moment this is only available for the MRI-2 videos.  I’ll need to add in metadata for the other video types later.

I also spent a bit more time working on the site migration, getting https://thepeoplesvoice.glasgow.ac.uk/ working again, fixing an issue with the place-name images upload for the Iona project and making updates to a number of other sites.