1. V ISUALIZING L IBRARY D ATA SLA Division of Pharmaceutical and Health Technology Spring Meeting Hilary Davis North Carolina State University Libraries April 12, 2011

2. L IBRARIES MEASURE A LOT OF THINGS

3. W HY DO WE MEASURE T HESE THINGS ? Value for money or time Use of collections and services Demonstrate worth and fit Support decision-making Better user experiences Align with organizational goals

5. G OALS F OR P RESENTING L IBRARY D ATA Impactful Drive home our point quickly Lingering impact Easy to digest

6. Q UICK P OLL What is your primary spreadsheet and graph/chart making tool? Flickr: ganzalo_ar

7. M INIMIZE N ON -D ATA INK What do you find distracting? What makes it harder to interpret?

8. S EQUENCE THE DATA Before

9. After

10. What makes it hard to read these charts? What time period does this data cover? What are the units of measure? G IVE C ONTEXT

11. B E S TRAIGHTFORWARD Before

12. After

13. D E -C LUTTER E XCEL Remove those grid lines No 3-D bars Throw away the pie chart Label your axes Remember the units Order the data Whats your point? Dont overwhelm Choose the best graph/table for your data Excel Chart Templates Flickr:smemon87

14. D ATA V ISUALIZATION T OOLS Microsoft Excel Google Gadgets ManyEyes Tableau Public Swivel – defunct Information Dashboards Flickr: JanneM

15. G OOGLE G ADGETS

18. T ABLEAU P UBLIC

19. E XAMPLE – J OURNAL B ACKFILES C OST PER U SE Excels defaults dont do the data justice

20. T ABLEAU P UBLIC E XAMPLE

21. S OURCES FOR INSPIRATION http://flowingdata.com/ http://infosthetics.com/ http://www.gapminder.org/ http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/

22. C REDITS Beautiful Data (Segaran & Hammerbacher, 2009) Show me the Numbers (Few, 2004) Now you see it (Few, 2009) Lisa Kurt and Will Kurt, University of Nevada Reno Edward Tufte Cory Lown (http://www.slideshare.net/corylown/data- visualization-7522083) Thanks! hilary_davis@ncsu.edu http://www.visualcv.com/hilarymdavis