visual buzz browser

I made a tool that lets me see how busy librarians were on any given day. It's nice to know that a librarian took 4 calls during a particular hour, but even better to see how long those 4 calls lasted, at a glance.

If you're logged in to this site, you can look at whole days at a time, such as September 28, 2006. Click on any session to see the anonymized transcript. It would be good to be able to browse by week, hour (or 2 or 3 hour chunks), librarian, library, or the type of question. If I'm going to go really crazy, to sort or filter the results by zip code, county, words in the text of the transcript, etc.

I did this by manipulating data I exported from OCLC QuestionPoint and drawing colored <div> boxes in CSS. Since IE disagrees with other browsers about what to do with margin elements, this only looks good in Firefox. It would be a good excuse for me to learn how to use a PHP image library, whatever that means.

If you don't have Firefox or aren't logged in, here is a picture.

This report is helpful to me mostly so I can know, without having to do anything but load a single page:

• were we busy?
• were there questions from school/academic/public libraries?
• were there any sessions that were really long?
• did any patrons wait a long time?
• did we cover the cooperative like we were supposed to?