APIs are useful for librarians. There are many things we can do with API data to benefit our libraries. But we don’t have to only make practical tools; we can also make things that are a bit silly. For example, I made a tool I’ve called the Fictograph, which lets you plot the awesomeness of an author’s works chronologically. You select an author, and the Fictograph queries the Goodreads API to get the average star rating for each of their books, then charts the results on the web. Go ahead and graph your favorite authors! The code is here. Feedback is appreciated.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.