Visualizing Library Collections Using HathiTrust Holidngs

Visualizing the Uniqueness, and Conformity, of Libraries

 "Tucked away in a presentation on the HathiTrust Digital Library are some fascinating visualizations of libraries by John Wilkin, the Executive Director of HathiTrust and an Associate University Librarian at the University of Michigan. Although I’ve been following the progress of HathiTrust closely, I missed these charts, and I want to highlight them as a novel method for revealing a library fingerprint or signature using shared metadata.

With access to the catalogs of HathiTrust member libraries, Wilkin ran some comparisons of book holdings. His ingenious idea was not only to count how many libraries held each particular work, but to create a visualization of each member library based on how widely each book in its collection is held by other libraries."

From Dan Cohen's Humanities Blog, read the piece at:http://www.dancohen.org/2012/12/13/visualizing-the-uniqueness-and-conformity-of-libraries/