Interactive maps from the ACH 2019 Conference

Our most recent mapping experiment explored whether CPL programming influences circulation for the Chicago-themed “One Book” selections in our dataset. If so, to what degree? What correlations, if any, could be inferred when mapping CPL events and OBOC checkouts for the three Chicago-themed books, The Adventures of Augie March, Warmth of Other Suns, and The Third Coast? Our hunch was that events have a considerable impact on the number of checkouts; however, the data reveals different trends.

Ana and Mihaela made useful visualizations. Because at the Pittsburgh ACH conference we did not have enough time to demo all the components of these maps, we are posting them here.

The first two sets of interactive maps were created using Jupyter notebooks and the gmaps python library, and show checkouts and events at CPL locations during each OBOC season. The last set of maps was created in ArcGIS Online, a cloud-based GIS software, and shows the two sets of data, checkouts and events, layered for each book.

Generally, checkout trends look similar across the three books with the north side library branches showing increased circulation compared to library branches on the South Side, except for a few locations on the far south-west side.

Compared to checkouts, events show a different pattern. CPL seems to have maintained a similar marketing effort for all books with some branches hosting more events than others. The number of events seems equally distributed among CPL locations for Augie March and The Third Coast. Warmth of Other Suns presents a different story. The high number of events offered at some locations does not seem to translate—on the surface at least—in an increased number of checkouts.

Follow the links associated with each set of maps to further explore our preliminary findings. Each map is equipped with a set of features, allowing zoom in/out, checkouts/events details per location and Chicago community area, legends, layers, attribute tables.

http://rodan.cdm.depaul.edu/~alucic/checkouts.html