IS428 AY2019-20T2 Assign SHERRY TAO SHI HUA

Overview

Background

In light of the ever-changing needs and requirements of faculty, students and staff, an extensive and comprehensive survey is conducted every two years, in which the users of both the Li Ka Shing Library and Kwa Geok Choo Law Library have the opportunity to rate various aspects of their services. The results aim to learn about the users’ perception of both libraries, especially in terms of importance and performance, and provides SMU libraries with input to help enhance existing services to adapt and improve their services.

Objective and Tasks

A Library Survey Report is generated after the survey. However, upon closer scrutiny of the report, we can see that it comprises of many pages of tables and confusing charts, which are difficult for users of the report to comprehend and find out the areas to improve. Hence, our objective is to apply appropriate data visualisation using what we have learnt in class to transform these into interactive visualisations so that users can save effort in understanding and making out the meaning of the tables and charts and focus on the main perceptions and areas of improvement, allowing for greater gain of useful insights to SMU Libraries.

The task is split into four groups of users’ perceptions:

undergraduates,
postgraduates,
faculty and
staff.

Since these four groups are so varied, they may have different perceptions of the various importance and performance of the library services, of which we need to further explore and gleam insights from.

Data preparation

Dataset

The 2018 Library Survey dataset is used for this Assignment, since the 2020 Library survey ended in late February and the dataset is not published. There are 2639 responses in this dataset, each to a unique Response ID. Of the 88 variables left in the dataset (excluding the unique identifier Response ID), 26 of the 88 are not applicable (NA01 to NA26) and will be excluded from the visualisations.

Of the 62 variables remaining in the dataset, 9 variables contains information on demographics of the respondent, such as which library they use more frequently (Campus), what their field of study is (StudyArea), how frequently they visit the campus, the library and accessing library resources (HowOftenL, HowOftenC, HowOftenW), which year of study they are in (Position), whether they are an international student (ID), net promoter score (NPS1) and an open-ended comment section (Comment1). The open-ended comment section will be excluded from the visualisations as well.

Of the rest of the 53 variables, 26 of them (I01 to I26) measures the importance of each assessment item while another 26 (P01 to P26) measures the performance of the same assessment items. All measures are in Likert Scale, from 1 to 7, stating how important or well-performed the assessment item is in each respondent’s view. The final variable (P27) is an overall satisfaction of the library, measured under Performance.