IS428 Visual Analytics for Business Intelligence

Overview

Every two years, SMU Libraries conduct a comprehensive survey in which faculty, students and staff have the opportunity to rate various aspects of SMU library's services. The survey provides SMU libraries with input to help enhance existing services and to anticipate emerging needs of SMU faculty, students and staff.

The interactive tableau chart can be found at here [1]

Data Preperation

Tableau Prep was used to process the data given in "Raw data 2018-03-07 SMU LCS data file - KLG.xlsx"

The overall steps look like:

Since the objective was to get the level of service as perceived by 4 main groups, when I processed the responses, I did not discriminate between the most frequented library, school that person is in, and the finer details of the groupings(eg. year 1, year 2).

Below will be a step by step guide of what I did to get the final output.

Screenshot	Steps
	I added both sheets into tableau prep
	I removed all the responses where respondents responded that it is not applicable to them
	I pivoted the values so that instead of having multiple responses to multiple questions in one row, each row will represent one response to one question
	I renamed several columns so that the headers have more meaning. Then I pivoted it so that there will be one row per question and answer.
	I filtered out all the null values that appear due to the previous pivot step.
	I did an inner join on both sheets so that I can get all the responses and their corresponding meaning
	I used a whole bunch of merge statements to replace the responses for Position, StudyArea, ID, Campus. This allows for the values to have meaning instead of staying as numbered responses.

Graphs and insights

Undergraduates

Number	Screenshot	Insights
1		Almost all undergraduates who responded have visited the library before, whereas there are a few undergraduates who have not utilized the library resources before. There may be an underlying issue here about how undergraduates do not know how to access the library services, and that more could be done to educate undergraduates on how to access library resources.
2		Undergraduates here are likely to recommend the library to others. Even though their scoring is lowest among all 4 groups, however it is still positive.
3		It seems that there is a huge difference in the perceived importance of the facilities in the library, and its actual performance. Among all the undergraduates who rate the facilities as important, there is a gap of 29.2% in the number of users who rate the actual performance of the library as high.
4		Examining the issue further by looking into the individual questions for the category, facilities, we notice a few questions that are instrumental in causing the gap in performance and importance. They are the issues of users being unable to find places in the library to conduct group work, the library is too noisy, and the the printing services do not meet the needs of the users. Since the survey was done in 2018, with the recent opening of SMU connexion, we might see improvements in the amount of spaces available for undergraduates to conduct group work. Last year in 2019, SMU was on a journey to improve the printing services. This action could have been spurred by the results of the survey. As for whether it helped to improve printing services, we have to examine the survey results of future years. As for the noise levels in the library, more could be done by the library to get users to keep their volume as low as possible.
5		Another area where there is a noticible different between performance and importance is in the informantion resources category.
6		Looking into the individual questions for information resource, we notice that the greatest discrepancy comes from the question of whether users find it easy to use mobile devices to access online resources. What we can take away is that the infrastructure of the school does not allow for users to be able to easily gain access to the information while on mobile devices. Personally I feel that this is a very salient point as undergraduates need to fully utilize their time to study, even while travelling on public transport. Have mobile friendly access to resources will allow for users to be able to study as and when they want to, even if they are travelling from home to school
7		As for the communication category, the performance of the library is similar to the importance that the respondents replied. Nitpicking the results, we can say that a large amount of users are neutral about the library services available. This could be a sign that although the undergraduates know about library services available, they are unsure if the scope of their knowledge is the whole scope of service that the library can provide. Perhaps more informative brochures or posters can be prepared that lists out all library servies for undergraduates to explore. This ties in with the previous points where I mentioned that some users have not accessed any of the resources that the library is able to provide.
8		Lastly, for the service category, the performance of the library is also similar to the importance. The question that stands out the most is the question on the workshops that the library holds. It seems that undergraduates view the library workshops as less important then its actual performance. Even though in this case the library is performing better than expected, as an institution of higher learning, the library should still be concerned that the undergraduates do not find the library workshops important.
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