Total Requests: This is the total number of items requested through the University of Illinois Library for the current day, starting from 1:00 am until the present time of viewing.
Most Popular are the top 10 popular items requested within the last hour, such as the Journal of Nanotechnology, the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, and the Teachers College Record.
Top 10 sources within last hour are the sources users are starting from, such as University of Illinois FullTextFinder, Google Scholar, EBSCO Academic Search Premier, or Web of Science.
Top 10 subjects within last hour are what subjects the users are searching for, such as nanotechnology, sports medicine, metalworking industries, organ (musical instrument).
Recent: last 10 requests are the items, such as journals, books or indexes users are requesting, such as the Journal of Exceptional Children, the Journal of Social Problems, and the Gale Book Review Index.
Each of the requests you see represented in this visualization passed through the Discover service of the University of Illinois Library.
The visualization portion of the project was created by using Processing. Processing, an open source programming language based on Java, is a development environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production.
The data is delivered as an XML feed. The XML feed refreshes every minute, and the data is valid for the respective time period indicated on-screen.
The data originates primarily from the SFX database and reports, with the exception of subject data. Subjects are not stored in SFX, so a custom query was developed to search recently requested titles against Voyager database tables, on a scheduled basis. The results are delivered to a temporary database table, which is used to populate the XML feed.
In order to allow Processing to interact with XML data, proXML library was used. proXML, developed by Christian Riekoff, provides basic reading and parsing capabilities. The visualization required more sophisticated XML element and attribute searching than is available out of the box with proXML, so custom search methods were developed.
Finally, to enhance the image and text quality of the resulting visualization, OpenGL rendering is used, made available by the OpenGL library within Processing. Supporting imagery and other visual content was custom designed in Adobe Photoshop.
The project is optimized to run at 1024x768 (XGA) resolution in full-screen mode. The software was originally written to allow for resolution independence, but some customization is still required for optimal results.
The project is displayed on a custom-built AMD 64-bit 3000+ PC, running the 32-bit version of Windows XP Professional, with an nVidia GeForce 6200 video card driving a 42" plasma display.
Susan Harum, Business Analyst, DLF (Digital Library Federation) and Lori Mestre, Digital Learning Librarian at the University of Illinois Library
Technical Work by Jonas Downey, Webmaster, Argonne National Laboratory, with support by Sharif Islam, Research Programmer, and John Weible, Head of Library Systems, University of Illinois Library.
This Project was supported by the Library Innovation Fund.
University LibraryFor comments on this page contact: E-Resource Support Team
Last modified by: John Weible on 12/6/07