Case study

Record Collection Analytics

A privacy-conscious view of collection trends across decade, genre, format, and catalog health.

What it is

Record Collection Analytics is a public-facing summary of a private record collection. It shows collection trends and catalog shape without exposing the raw inventory.

Why I built it

The collection data is useful for more than shelf management. It can show how buying habits change over time, which formats or decades dominate, and where the catalog is thin or messy. The public version needs to keep that context while respecting privacy.

What it does

The current version summarizes collection trends from a sanitized Discogs snapshot. It supports chart views by decade, genre, and format, plus enough surrounding copy to explain what the numbers are and what they are not.

Technical shape

The public site reads a static collection snapshot rather than live Discogs inventory. That keeps the site fast, deployable on static hosting, and safe to publish. The chart layer can evolve independently from the private sync tooling used by Discogs Spinner.

What I learned

Good personal analytics still need product judgment. The useful question is not how much data can be shown. It is which views help someone understand the shape of the collection without turning the page into an inventory dump.

What’s next

The next improvements are clearer collection views, a better explanation of the sanitized snapshot, and small trend callouts that make the charts easier to scan.