Library Map Part 1

This weekend past I ran the Generous & Open Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums (GO GLAM) Miniconf at LinuxConf.au, with Bonnie Wildie. Being a completely online conference this year, we had an increased pool of people who could attend and also who could speak, and managed to put together what I think was a really great program. I certainly learned a lot from all our speakers, and I'll probably share some thoughts on the talks and projects later this year.

I also gave a short talk, about my new Library Map project and some thoughts on generosity in providing open data. Unfortunately, Alissa is completely right about my talk. The tone was wrong. I spoke about the wrong things and in the wrong way. It was an ungenerous talk on the virtues of generosity. I allowed my frustration at underfunded government bureaucracies and my anxiety about the prospect of giving a "technical" talk that "wasn't technical enough" for LCA to overwhelm the better angels of my nature. I won't be sharing the video of my own talk when it becomes available, but here is a short clip of me not long after I delivered it:

via GIPHY

So I'm trying again. In this post I'll outline the basic concepts, and the why of Library Map - why I wanted to make it, and why I made the architecture and design choices I've made. In the next post, I'll outline how I built it - some nuts and bolts of which code is used where (and also, to some extent, why). You may be interested in one, or the other, or neither post 🙂.

Library Map

The Library Map is a map of libraries in Australia and its external territories. There are three 'layers' to the map:

Libraries

The libraries layer shows every public library in Australia, plus an indicative 800m radius around it. Also mapped on additional overlays are State and National libraries, Indigenous Knowledge Centres, and most still-operating Mechanics Institutes.

Rules

The Rules layer has two overlays.

The Fines overlay colour-codes each library service area according to whether they charge overdue fines for everyone, only for adults, or not at all.

The Loan Periods overlay uses patterns (mostly stripes) to indicate the standard loan period in weeks (2, 3, 4, or 6 as it turns out).

Library Management Software

The Library Management Software layer works basically the same as the Rules layer, except it colour codes library services according to which library management system (a.k.a Intergrated Library System) they use.

What is the library map for?

I've wanted something like this map at various times in the past. There is a fair amount of information around at the regional and state level about loan periods, or fine regimes, and even library management systems. But a lot of this is in people's heads, or in lists within PDF documents. I'm not sure I'd call myself a 'visual learner' but sometimes it is much clearer to see something mapped out visually than to read it in a table.

The intended audience for the map is actually a little bit "inside baseball". I'm not trying to build a real-time guide for library users to find things like current opening hours. Google Maps does a fine job of that, and I'm not sure a dedicated site for every public library but only libraries is a particularly useful tool. It would also be a nightmare to maintain. The site ultimately exists because I wanted to see if I could do it, but I had — broadly — two specific use cases in mind:

Mapping library management systems to visualise network effects

My talk at LCA2018 was called Who else is using it? — in reference to a question library managers often ask when confronting a suggestion to use a particular technology, especially something major like a library management system. This is understandable — it's reassuring to know that one's peers have made similar decisions ("Nobody gets fired for buying IBM"), but there are also genuine advantages to having a network of fellow users you can talk to about shared problems or desired features. I was interested in whether these sorts of networks and aggregate purchasing decisions might be visible if they were mapped out, in a different way to what might be clear from a list or table. Especially at a national level — I suspected there were strong trends within states in contrasts between them, but didn't have a really clear picture.

The State Library of Queensland was invaluable in this regard, because they have a list of every library service in the state and which library management system they use. When visiting lib