Circulating Now as Data: Community Representation

By Eli Wachter ~

Since its launch in 2013, Circulating Now has published more than one thousand posts highlighting historical materials within the National Library of Medicine (NLM) collection. These contributions reflect a vibrant community dedicated to preserving, increasing, and sharing medical history knowledge. In recognition of this community, Circulating Now managing editor Elizabeth Mullen and I undertook a project to identify and document the institutions mentioned within the blog. Together, we developed a dataset and visualizations that illustrate the collaborative nature and extensive reach of Circulating Now.

To better understand the community represented within the blog, we analyzed data exported from the blog’s backend using a combination of digital tools. Because Circulating Now is hosted on WordPress, we were able to download an XML file containing the full content of nearly every published post since 2013. We used XQuery scripts—generated with the help of ChatGPT—to search this content for references to institutions, including libraries, museums, universities, and other organizations. The scripts searched for 13 keywords commonly found near the names of institutions—such as university, library, or center—and returned every instance of those keywords plus five words before and after. These text snippets gave us a starting point for identifying the names of the institutions.

We then manually reviewed and refined the results in Excel, removing words that were not a part of the institution name and updating former names to the most current name for each institution. We also added geographic information based on the institution’s headquarters and classified each institution by type. The institution types included libraries, museums, academic institutions, or other professional organizations. This approach offered a clearer view of the communities contributing to and featured in the blog over the last twelve years.

From this work, we identified over 400 unique institutions, with representation across the world. We saw the greatest representation in the United States East Coast.

A map of the earth with blue circles of various sizes on different locations — Geographic distribution of institutions mentioned in *Circulating Now*

We also found that two thirds of institutions mentioned in Circulating Now are academic, including numerous universities and other schools. Specific libraries and museums only account for 10% of the institutions highlighted.

A pie chart with different colored segments labeled "academia," "library," "museum," and "professional organization" — Types of institutions represented in *Circulating Now*

With these findings, we see opportunities for future growth and collaboration to strengthen the blog’s representation of institutions, increasing collaboration with institutions who benefit from NLM collections and related resources, and welcoming new contributors to further broaden the reach of the blog, and by extension, the National Library of Medicine.

This post marks my own beginning to joining the Circulating Now guest author community, and I hope these insights show just how grand this community is. For anyone interested in becoming a guest author, please contact Elizabeth Mullen to propose a topic. I sincerely look forward to reading your posts about the history of medicine and the NLM collection!

Eli Wachter received a master’s in library and information science from the University of Washington in June 2024 and was a 2024–2025 National Library of Medicine Associate Fellow. Eli now works as a Data Visualization Librarian at Michigan State University