- Megan Johanson
Library Data Makeover: Using Color to Tell a Story
This interesting CNN article describes the New York Public Library’s most checked out books of all time. The article provides a list of the top ten books and their check-out numbers, as well as some insights on why some types of books were checked out more than others.

Visualizing the Data
While I think the data provided are really interesting, I don’t think the article does it justice. To really get the scale of the top ten books, I put them into a bar chart.
Doing so allowed me to quickly see that there was a difference of almost 300,000 check-outs between 1st place book and the 10th place book, which was not obvious when I viewed the list. That’s huge!

Using Color to Tell a Story
Once I had the basic bar chart, I realized that with a few very simple tweaks I could tell different stories with the same data.
Children's versus Adult Books
First, I color-coded the bars based on whether each book was for children or adults. As the article pointed out, children’s books are shorter and therefore do not take as long to read. This means that they are able to be returned and checked out more frequently than books for adults. Therefore, it was not surprising that children’s books made up six of the top ten.
By making all the non-children's book bars gray, they are visually backgrounded and the green bars draw your eye. Additionally, I added a subtitle that clearly states the main finding of this analysis.

Male versus Female Authors
Next, I wanted to tell a story about the authors of the top ten books. As you can see from the chart below, men dominate the list. The only woman to make the top ten was J.K. Rowling with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

Fiction versus Non-Fiction Books
Lastly, I decided to color-code the data by fiction versus non-fiction books. The fact that there were so many children’s books on the list did foreshadow that there would be more fiction books than non-fiction, but I was surprised that even the books targeted to adults were primarily fiction. The one exception on the list is the business classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People.
