Rare & Unique Digital Collections...Now!

Viewed Monday, February 10, 2014, at 9:00PM

Want to see what’s popular in our digitized collections? We have a new feature in our Rare and Unique Digital Collections site that allows users to see what others have been, and are currently, viewing. We call it “Popular,” and it allows you to see what’s been viewed today , this week , and even right now .

There are several things that are appealing about the Popular and Now features. Viewing what others are viewing and waiting to see what will pop up next is often surprising and inherently entertaining. To the staff who are responsible for making these resources available, it’s a nice experience to see what our users are taking an interest in. Maybe it’s a portrait of a basketball player from the 1970s (viewed Monday, February 10, 2014, at 8:50PM) or maybe it’s two small children posing with a pig that’s bigger than they are (viewed Monday, February 10, 2014, at 3:40PM).

Perhaps better than that, the Now feature has turned out to be a great way to discover unseen or forgotten materials in our collections.

Here’s how the Now feature works. In most cases on the Web, your browser makes a request and a server returns files (HTML, images, CSS, JavaScript). In order to have new content on the page, the browser needs to make a new request. Sometimes it needs to make a lot of requests to get what it needs. Making all these requests takes time and can slow things down. When you're on the Now page, your browser has a persistent connection, a WebSocket , open with the server. As soon as someone views a resource, a small message is pushed to your browser and the resource is displayed. Because the connection on the Now page is always open, the browser doesn't have to make a lot of new requests. This quick push message can happen in less than a second allowing you to see moment to moment what is actually being viewed on the site.

All of these resources are available for viewing as part of the NCSU Libraries’ Rare & Unique Digital Collections , which provides access to thousands of images, video and audio recordings, and text documenting NC State history. Check out what’s going on now .

Jason Ronallo contributed to this entry.