Visualizations at Seattle Public Library – What Community is Reading?

Share

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

Seattle Public Library’s Central branch not only boasts unique architecture but also world class visualizations of library data. On the level 5 of the building they have six large LCD display screens dedicated to provide visualizations of data like what people are reading, which books are checked out in the last hour etc. See them for yourself :

Vital Statistics:

spl-vital-statistics
[large size]

Vital statistics displays running totals from various categories – books, CDs, DVDs etc. that people have checked out in the last one hour.

Floating Titles:

spl-floating-titles
[large size]

As the name suggests, floating titles shows the names of various items members have checked out in the order of check out time. The items start floating at right corner and slowly move to left and colored based on category of item (books are red etc.) Items with similar Dewey decimal classification (the numbers you see on library books) are placed at same height and items that are checked out at same time are closer to each other.

Keyword Map Attack:

spl-keyword-map-attack
[large size]

This visualization uses the keywords of checked out titles and maps them based on how many Dewey categories those keywords can be mapped to.

All in all these visualizations provide a comprehensive look at what the library members are reading. If you ever visit Seattle don’t miss the Central library, it is such a great place with millions of books and marvelous architecture.

If you want to find out more about the visualizations in SPL visit George Legrady‘s home page and click on SPL Visualization Link. Artist George Legrady created this visualization at SPL.

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

Share this tip with your colleagues

Excel and Power BI tips - Chandoo.org Newsletter

Get FREE Excel + Power BI Tips

Simple, fun and useful emails, once per week.

Learn & be awesome.

Welcome to Chandoo.org

Thank you so much for visiting. My aim is to make you awesome in Excel & Power BI. I do this by sharing videos, tips, examples and downloads on this website. There are more than 1,000 pages with all things Excel, Power BI, Dashboards & VBA here. Go ahead and spend few minutes to be AWESOME.

Read my storyFREE Excel tips book

Overall I learned a lot and I thought you did a great job of explaining how to do things. This will definitely elevate my reporting in the future.
Rebekah S
Reporting Analyst
Excel formula list - 100+ examples and howto guide for you

From simple to complex, there is a formula for every occasion. Check out the list now.

Calendars, invoices, trackers and much more. All free, fun and fantastic.

Advanced Pivot Table tricks

Power Query, Data model, DAX, Filters, Slicers, Conditional formats and beautiful charts. It's all here.

Still on fence about Power BI? In this getting started guide, learn what is Power BI, how to get it and how to create your first report from scratch.

7 Responses to “Project Dashboard + Tweetboard = pure awesomeness!!!”

  1. Dan Murray says:

    I would like to see actual hash-tagged DM tweets go out to the specific information consumers. That would be an interesting way to communicate the key daily data to interested parties.

    A Twitter-like secure application like Yammer might be a good fit with this.

    For example, how about daily tweets to selected user groups (secure) that would display sales, bookings, cash receipts, cash disbursed and a second version that would show the same info for MTD, QTD or YTD figures.

  2. Aires says:

    @Dan, it would be great. I did not taught about implementing it on this dashboard because twitter is blocked to the whole intranet here. However, there's a discussion here about how can we send these tweets to blackberries (probably through e-mail) automatically. (I'd like to see this implemented on a jabber restricted network as well, but here it'll probably not happen)

    The wrap-up versions you mentioned doesn't apply to my particular scenario, but on a sales tweetboard it would be a great tool indeed - choosing who will receive which message according to hashtags. I'll think on something, thanks for the advice. 🙂

    (Ah, btw, I'm Fernando... 🙂 )

  3. Chandoo says:

    @Dan: That is a fun idea. Instead of tightly integrating twitter functionality with a dashboard, i think it would be cool if we have a "tweet this" button that users can click after selecting a range of cells. We can easily show a dialog with the concatenated output of the selected cells and ask user to edit the text and eventually "send to twitter".

    For eg. you can select the annual sales figure cell and click on "tweet this" button upon which a dialog will show the value. Then you can pre-pend it something like "DM @boss look at our sales this year: "

    @Aires.. thanks once again.

  4. Wow it looks really good. Not sure though how much the tweet facility would help in real world project management, but certainly having a dashboard on a project should be a key deliverable when learning how to manage a project

    The other use of this is during the software development life cycle especially when you have parallel streams of development and testing going on. Using a dashboard is a quick way for everyone on the team to see where the project is at and how it all fits together.

    Regards

    Susan de Sousa
    Site Editor http://www.my-project-management-expert.com

  5. Sue says:

    Hi Chandoo,
    I purchased the project management toolkit but the dashboard shown above with the imbedded scroll bars. Is it included in the project pack??
    Thanks

    Sue

  6. XLCalibre says:

    The gantt chart section of this dashboard is similar to one I have recently created: http://xlcalibre.com/hr-dashboard-gantt-chart-traffic-light-reportIt has a similar approach with scroll bars, but has a couple of additional features. I've tried to incorporate a traffic light report element, and also allow the timescale to adjusted so that can view it by days, weeks or months.I really like the other tables that you've incorporated, I may well try to replicate them to improve my version!

  7. I am a monitoring and evaluation consultant in international development, and one of the services I offer is to help non-profits and foundations develop performance dashboards.  I often advise them to develop dashboards for ongoing programs, rather than for one-time or pilot projects, because of the time involved.  I am trying to find out from a few people how long it takes you to develop a project management dashboard, and to what extent the indicators vary from one project to the next.

Leave a Reply