This session by David Kane from the Waterford Institute of Technology.

LiveLabs Pivot is a product designed to “interact with massive amounts of data in ways that are powerful, informative and fun” (quote from Microsoft) or “making sense out of mountains of data” (MIT Technology Review). Initially worked via a dedicated viewer, but now can be viewed in a browser.

Pivot allows you to drill-down to specific items using faceted browsing – David demonstrates this with this collection of cars in Pivot provided by Microsoft (you need Silverlight installed to view this).

At the Waterford Institute they used Pivot as a data analysis tool:

• Downloaded data about 5,000 most ‘in demand’ books from the library system (i.e. most under pressure rather than necessarily most borrowed – that is a popular book, but where there were many copies in the library would not be included)
• Then allocated colours to sets of books depending on level of demand (green through to red)

Gives way of visualising demand – and make case for additional copies etc.

David mentions ‘Google Refine‘ which also allows visualisations of data.

David shows another Pivot visualisation – looking at how books are distributed across different locations and library branches.

What did he use to create the visualisations?

• Microsoft PivotViewer
• Pivot Collection tool for Excel
• Miscosoft Visual Studio 2010 (for Silverlight)
• Silverlight 4 tools for visual studio
• Silverlight 4 toolkit

David shows online example at http://researchscope.net/pivot/beastquest/index.php – created using a Z39.50 connection to the catalogue and some PHP processing.

Q: How could it deal with multiple languages?

A: Can generate text in appropriate language ‘on the fly’ and overlay on images. Also Sliverlight has some ability to provide text labels in appropriate languages

Q: Interested in work on ‘high demand’ items – does it have an application to ‘reading lists’?

A: Good question – reading lists are something they are looking at currently in general, but haven’t considered how Pivot would be used.

Q: Can you use Pivot to incorporate ebooks?

A: Absolutely no reason why not. But if you wanted to merge collections that problem would need solving first – Pivot not doing this for you. But could use colour coding to differentiate ebooks from print books and so easily visualise where you have ebook coverage etc.