Finding Meaning in the Madness: Unifying Your Library’s Data Collection with LibAnalytics

Libraries have collected data across multiple platforms and areas and developed reports to inform their stakeholders to show the value of the library. As data collection methods have evolved, more assessment platforms have become available in the market. LibAnalytics can help you pull together an all-inclusive, real-time assessment of your library’s services. At the University of Maryland, Priddy Library, we implemented LibAnalytics in 2011 to centralize our data collection points on numerous library services. Learn how this personalized tool has helped the Priddy Library aggregate statistics on library services such as gate counts, circulation and acquisition statistics, interlibrary loan activity, reference statistics and library instruction sessions. The presentation will focus on how we developed a customized instance based on library services and the assessment needs specific to our library. Participants will brainstorm data collection points based on their library services and how to group data points logically. The presentation will discuss how to create a dataset, categorize data entry fields, develop questions, select data field types (i.e. numeric, single or multi option dropdown menus, or text fields), and edit existing datasets. In a few simple steps, learn how to filter your data, generate custom reports, create visualizations, analyze library usage instantly, and produce shareable dashboards to provide a comprehensive overview of your library’s metrics. Through these features, learn how your library can assess trends across multiple years, make data driven decisions to improve services and demonstrate the library’s value

Building Roseburg Public Library’s Community Demographics Dashboard

In a globally connected society becoming increasingly reliant on data, community GIS practitioners help bring spatial data to community organizations and other community partners in the form of data acquisition, collection, analytics, visualization, and presentation. Many Community GIS practitioners help their community partners better serve their community by harnessing the power of GIS, including community partners who advocate for and provide services to their community. Public libraries are one such service-providing entity that has been struggling in modern times, especially in rural areas. The Center for Geography Education in Oregon received grant funding in 2020 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services for the GIS-Mapping Exchange, a program meant to provide funding and help connect public libraries with GIS technology while fostering relationships with local GIS professionals. During the summer of 2022, a partnership was formed with the Roseburg Public Library in central Oregon. This report documents not only an example of community GIS, but also a pilot project for the GIS-Mapping Exchange. The goal of this partnership was to create operations dashboards for the library, summarizing their active library cardholder data alongside demographic data from the 2020 US Decennial Census, the 2020 American Community Survey, and current Student Enrollment data from the Oregon department of education. The data for these dashboards was prepared using Esri’s ArcGIS Pro and hosted on ArcGIS Online along with the dashboards themselves. These dashboards will be used to gain insight into the spatial distribution of active library cardholders and the demographics of the community they’re serving, helping the library conduct better outreach and apply for grants

Students’ learning responses to receiving dashboard data (Junhong Xiao trans.)

Learner dashboards are a graphical interface that manipulate and present to the student data about their learning behaviours (attendance, visits to the library, attainment etc.). This scoping study aimed to explore the under researched areas of undergraduate students’ responses to the use of learning dashboards through data gathered from twenty-four final year undergraduate students in a single faculty in a UK university. The study suggests that, similar to feedback literacy (Sutton 2012), there is a type of literacy associated with dashboards that has components of knowing, being and acting and that employing these concepts helps us to understand how students’ respond to dashboards. The implications for institutions to consider as they take forward these tools are outlined

Continuous Performance Benchmarking Framework for ROOT

Foundational software libraries such as ROOT are under intense pressure to avoid software regression, including performance regressions. Continuous performance benchmarking, as a part of continuous integration and other code quality testing, is an industry best-practice to understand how the performance of a software product evolves over time. We present a framework, built from industry best practices and tools, to help to understand ROOT code performance and monitor the efficiency of the code for a several processor architectures. It additionally allows historical performance measurements for ROOT I/O, vectorization and parallelization sub-systems.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, CHEP 2018 - 23rd International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physic

Improvement of the IT-PES-PS Section Services Statistics Page

Project Specification: The IT-PES-PS service managers gather a lot of statistics for the services they run. These statistics are currently displayed by SLS (Service Level Status) or Lemon pages. They also use the Web interface provided with OpenTSDB, a DB optimised for time series. And while these various pages give very useful and technical information, they do not always emphasise the important figures. Having different statistics pages makes it difficult to see the relevant numbers at once. The goal of this project was to build homogeneous dashboards with interactive plots to better reflect the activity and resources of each service, showing relevant figures at first sight in a single website. Abstract: There is a need in the IT-PES-PS section to improve the current situation of having to consult the relevant information from several heterogeneous websites by introducing interactive homogeneous dashboards, accessible from a single web application where the information needed can be quickly accessed. The goal of this openlab Summer Student project was to create a website with homogeneous and interactive dashboards. Its architecture had to allow the creation of new dashboards easily

The Data Framework: A Collaborative Tool for Assessment at the UNLV Libraries

Keeping track of the data that academic libraries capture is a massive task. The University of Nevada - Las Vegas (UNLV) University Libraries developed a data framework as a tracking tool for data points. This framework is both a data dictionary and a manual that records data-gathering procedures. This ensures that the data is continually gathered and reported in the same way, and also ensures that institutional memory of those procedures is preserved, regardless of staff turnover. Additionally, the revised Data Framework, and the revision process, transformed staff attitudes about data reporting and strengthened the libraries\u27 culture of assessment

Collection Dashboards for Selectors

While collections dashboards are often used as an external communications tool, they have additional applications for improving internal processes and assisting subject selectors. The value of collection visualization for analytics and strategy cannot be underestimated as visualizations can help clarify complex information to improve decision-making. This paper summarizes the current efforts to deploy collection dashboards at the University of Houston libraries. Using Tableau to parse and visualize collections data, the library is embedding visualization frameworks into the acquisitions calendar to enhance selection and deselection processes

Student-Centered Learning: Functional Requirements for Integrated Systems to Optimize Learning

The realities of the 21st-century learner require that schools and educators fundamentally change their practice. "Educators must produce college- and career-ready graduates that reflect the future these students will face. And, they must facilitate learning through means that align with the defining attributes of this generation of learners."Today, we know more than ever about how students learn, acknowledging that the process isn't the same for every student and doesn't remain the same for each individual, depending upon maturation and the content being learned. We know that students want to progress at a pace that allows them to master new concepts and skills, to access a variety of resources, to receive timely feedback on their progress, to demonstrate their knowledge in multiple ways and to get direction, support and feedback from—as well as collaborate with—experts, teachers, tutors and other students.The result is a growing demand for student-centered, transformative digital learning using competency education as an underpinning.iNACOL released this paper to illustrate the technical requirements and functionalities that learning management systems need to shift toward student-centered instructional models. This comprehensive framework will help districts and schools determine what systems to use and integrate as they being their journey toward student-centered learning, as well as how systems integration aligns with their organizational vision, educational goals and strategic plans.Educators can use this report to optimize student learning and promote innovation in their own student-centered learning environments. The report will help school leaders understand the complex technologies needed to optimize personalized learning and how to use data and analytics to improve practices, and can assist technology leaders in re-engineering systems to support the key nuances of student-centered learning

Department Library Dashboards as a Measure of Library Value

A department dashboard approach to measuring library value was developed after the library was charged with measuring its contributions to the academic program distinctives at a liberal arts college. This presentation will focus on using data that libraries already collect to tell a story about an academic department’s library activity. Working in a dashboard culture, how the dashboards will be used to drive future conversations with departments and effects on library decision-making will be discussed