Geelong Regional Libraries data by branch 2015-2016

The Geelong Regional Library Corporation operates across four Local Government Authorities (LGAs) in the greater Geelong region. The library branches differ in their socioeconomic setting, usage and positioning, and this data visualisation assists in exploring these.

The centrally-located Geelong Libary and Heritage Centre has over 84k collection items, with smaller holdings at sites such as Chilwell, Highton, Barwon Heads and Western Heights. However, Belmont actually handles around 10% more loans than Geelong. Membership volume reflects general population patterns around Geelong, except for Highton and Chilwell, which are served by larger branches such as Waurn Ponds and Geelong West. It is likely that outer branch memberships (Lara, Bannockburn, Torquay) will grow as surrounding populations grow.

In general, event attendance reflects the branch size, with an outlier in Bannockburn and Newcomb having significantly strong event attendance given their branch size. Drysdale appears to have poor event attendance given its volume of visitors, loans and members. Wireless sessions are by far the strongest at Ocean Grove, with significantly fewer sessions at larger branches like Geelong and Belmont. This may reflect poorer internet access on the Bellarine. Public access internet sessions in general reflect the membership and loan volume of the branch.

Credits

Data visualisation in HTML, Javascript and CSS by Kathy Reid.

This visualisation took approximately 5 days to code.

Based on elements from Visual Cinnamon by Nadieh Bremer, Mike Bostock, Zan Armstrong and Ben Best.

Source code available on GitHub. For a walkthrough of the development process, please see this blog post.



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License