Accessing National Bibliographic Data in Visual Dialog with Biographic Data

Strategy development and technical solutions for exploiting the full potential of national bibliographic data are central to ongoing efforts in efficiently meeting goals at national libraries. This paper present methods and models for evaluating the usefulness of national bibliographic data that rely on technical presuppositions, focusing on analyses of how the data’s visual representation and narrative content may become more understandable to users and ultimately contribute to furthering knowledge. These methods were developed with the aim of enhancing the accessibility of national bibliographic data. The paper addresses the importance of transparency and documentation of criteria for unique data within a body of national bibliographic data. Qualitative goals for data in relation to user needs are demonstrated by a set of visualization experiments extracted from data derived from the Swedish national bibliography. The National Library of Sweden began to develop methods for evaluating the usefulness of national bibliographic data by way of visualizations in 2015. In this paper it is discussed how the quality and usefulness of national bibliographic data may provide valuable insight into potential development and improvement focus areas, and in doing so, uncover new knowledge. The project was developed in three steps: 1) publishing a statistical report 2) visualization of findings 3) a fact-sharing seminar. A conscientious renewal of the annual statistics report sought to convey the complexity and enormous span of findings, and potential knowledge gain possible to exploit from the data. What stories would surface from the national bibliographic data about Swedish publishing trends? How could methods be developed for users to interact with the data and create their own relevant data sets? Broader findings would not be immediately perceivable after only one year, so the goal was to limit the scope to a single theme, and plan for a recurrent, annual event to showcase findings over time. The theme chosen in 2015 focused on “life stories”, and is based on a data set limited by biographical coding.