Threads of 2022: a Year of Checkouts | Dartmouth Libraries

November 03, 2022

December 01, 2022

Baker-Berry Library

Curated by the Fibrarians: Samara Cary, Simon Stone, Stephen Krueger, Tara Custer, and Daniel Lin.

Staff from Dartmouth Libraries wanted to encourage library staff and the campus community to engage and interact with library-specific data in an unexpected, creative way. Their solution? Combine metadata visualization and crafting with physical materials to think innovatively about the interaction between the digital and the physical. Introducing the Fibery Library!

About the Project

Welcome to the first installment of the Fibery Library! Using data from 2022, our team of knitters and crocheters on the library staff crafted scarves which visualize the number of loaned physical items per day. We chose different color palettes to represent different user groups. With each scarf, you can "read" the color changes from left to right, where each row represents one day of checkouts, from January through December. The darker the color, the more checkouts there were on that row's corresponding day. Try to spot patterns such as the beginnings and ends of academic terms, days of the week, and big campus weekends!

Special thanks goes out to the core team of project organizers: Samara Cary, Simon Stone, Stephen Krueger, Tara Custer, and Daniel Lin. Additional thanks to the Library Innovation Fund for providing support to purchase materials for this project! Physical exhibit designed by Dennis Grady. Digital exhibit designed by Daniel Lin.

Original Digital Exhibit

Our team ran into a number of challenges along the way, from deciding what kind of visualization to focus on, to dealing with absolute checkout numbers vs. percentiles. Interestingly, this process turned out to be not that different from prototyping. You want to create something quickly, but you also want to be able to make changes to it easily, improve upon it, iterate, try out an idea without spending too much time on additional development. Incremental changes to perspectives and code allowed us to create post cards that visualized what the scarf would look like. Here’s what Simon Stone from Research Data Services had to say:

“For me personally, it was a great experience to see the creative mindset and the (software) engineer's mindset align like this. It reminded me of the importance of giving yourself room to try out ideas, and avoid painting yourself into a corner in a project, for example by writing too rigid code. It is so easy to self-censor if implementing an idea takes a lot of work: 'Is it really worth it? Probably not, so I am not going to try.' But if you set your project up right, failure becomes much less of a worry, and you can actually have a lot of fun experimenting, even if the results are sometimes not what you expected.”

After Simon wrangled the data and created the visualizations, the rest of our team set out to bring the designs to life. Stephen created swatches that helped determine the look and stitch count for the knit pieces. Samara experimented with different crocheted stitches; she determined that 'single crochet' would look best. We ordered yarn from KnitPicks. And when all the materials were delivered and ready, we sorted and organized all the yarn into kits by user group. Each kit included yarn, a heatmap postcard, a key card, and the pattern.

To learn more about the code that powered this project, check out the code release and repository!

Samara Cary (she/her)

Samara grew up in nearby Vermont and now lives in Northern Massachusetts. She's been with the Dartmouth Libraries since 2017. As an artist, she loves to bring creativity and new ideas into her everyday tasks. Outside of work, her hobbies include crochet, gaming, puzzles, and spoiling her cat, Max.

“I am a Digital Project Specialist for Digital by Dartmouth Library. I help prepare digital collections for publication to the Dartmouth Libraries’ website. My main responsibility is to oversee collections that we put onto FromThePage, a crowd-sourced transcription website.

“I chose to work on the Alum user group scarf, simply because purple is my favorite color!”