Harvard Library Haystacks by Rachel Binx

The Harvard Library Haystacks shows the books in the Harvard Library by publication date, the subject of the book, and popularity. The user could also enter a search term to narrow down the books shown on the visualization. It also provides the names and authors of the books that showed up on the graph. The data was provided by the Harvard Library Lab, and it is not stated on how the visualization was made.

In this visualization, it was clear to see the patterns and trends of certain ideas and books at Harvard throughout time. The user could see that most of the popular books in the library were based in science and medicine, or that there was a drastic increase of publications about the internet in 2000s. This design prioritized the simple and clear representation of the books, by using colored circles to represent the different subjects.

This visualization is leaving out the demographic of the students and faculty in Harvard of where the data was taken from. The studies of the students would reflect the types of books that are checked out of the library. Thus the trends in the graphs could be reflective of the courses taken by the students.