Penn State Floating Library Analysis

This repository provides a visualization of monthly data snapshots for Penn State's floating collection library. The files contained here were created for a research assistantship during the 2016 spring semester.

The Website

The index.html file is a static web page for visualizing time series patterns in the floating collection data. To display the site, this repository and all its contents should be hosted on a web server.

Updating Monthly Snapshots

The data that lives behind the website can be updated using the update.py Python script on Mac OS X. Follow these steps to update the website:

1) Open the Terminal application on Mac OS X and cd to the Desktop.

• The Terminal application is the command line for Mac OS X, and it's where we'll run the Python script that updates the website data. To open Terminal on your Mac, press COMMAND + SPACEBAR on your keyboard, type "Terminal", then press ENTER.
• cd means to change directories. We're going to be working with files on our Mac's Desktop, so we need to change Terminal's working directory to ~/Desktop. Type (or copy and paste) cd ~/Desktop into Terminal and hit ENTER on your keyboard.

2) Copy this repository with the command git clone https://github.com/aaronpdennis/floating-library.git then cd to the floating-library directory.

• This is a command that runs from Terminal and downloads this project from the web. Type (or copy and paste) git clone https://github.com/aaronpdennis/floating-library.git into Terminal and hit ENTER on your keyboard. There will now be a folder (a.k.a. directory) on your Desktop called floating-library. Move to this directory by typing (or copying and pasting) cd floating-library into Terminal and hit ENTER on your keyboard.

3) Copy in all the monthly Excel spreadsheet snapshots from a flash drive with the command cp /Volumes/FLASH_DRIVE/excel-spreadsheets ./excel-spreadsheets

• This command makes a copy of the snapshot data from the flash drive and adds it to our working directory. Type (or copy and paste) cp /Volumes/FLASH_DRIVE/excel-spreadsheets ./excel-spreadsheets into Terminal and hit ENTER on your keyboard.
• These spreadsheets should follow the naming convention BookFloatSnapshot<YEAR><MONTH><DAY>.xlsx where <YEAR> is the four digit year of the snapshot, <MONTH> is the two digit month of the snapshot, and <DAY> is the two digit date of the snapshot. For example, a spreadsheet for a snapshot of the floating collection taken on September 4th, 2014 should be named BookFloatSnapshot20140904.xlsx.
• If you're updating the data every month, it's best to keep using the same excel-spreadsheets folder on the flash drive and add a new spreadsheet for each new snapshot.
• If your flash drive is named something other than FLASH_DRIVE, substitute your drive's name for FLASH_DRIVE in the command cp /Volumes/FLASH_DRIVE/excel-spreadsheets ./excel-spreadsheets.

4) Run python update.py from the command line

• On the command line, type python update.py and press ENTER on your keyboard.
• This runs the Python script included in the repository that parses the excel spreadsheets, aggregates different measures, and then translates them to a format used by the website.
• To check if the visualization is updated, you can run the command python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000 and then go to http://localhost:8000/ in a web browser (like Chrome) and see the website.

To Review:

These are the commands you'll run from Terminal. You can copy and paste all of these onto the command line at once.

cd ~/Desktop
git clone https://github.com/aaronpdennis/floating-library.git
cd floating-library
cp -R /Volumes/FLASH_DRIVE/excel-spreadsheets ./excel-spreadsheets
python update.py
python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000

Once everything is done running, checkout http://localhost:8000/. This is a local preview of how the page will look. To host online, place all the contents of the floating-library folder, except for the excel-spreadsheets, on a web server.