Check it out: Click on ‘Publication Year’ on any result set after doing a search [or click on the graph on the main page, but I think it’s more useful after a search], and see a timeline; you can also ‘drill down’ into the timeline, and you’ll then see a sort of ‘zoomed in’ timeline of the range you selected.

https://blacklight.mse.jhu.edu/demo

The resolution of the bars is currently set at around 10, but I believe the underlying Solr search engine powering this could handle higher — 20, certainly — 100, maybe but not sure. Haven’t played with it, since this seemed good enough for now and I had other things to work on. It’s actually just a parameter in the code though, could be set to any number. And of course the graph could be displayed larger, as on the first page, but didn’t seem useful in this interface to do so.

I think it turned out pretty slick.

That’s an under development demo of the blacklight/solr powered opac replacement we’re working on, it’s not in production and is a bit wonky occasionally. And yes, it’s got a non-trusted SSL cert sorry, need to fix it soon.