Talis Insight Asia-Pacific 2018 - Craig Milne and Kelly Johson, Griffith University

Craig Milne – Manager, Scholarly Resource & Library Campus Services
Kelly Johnson – Team Leader, Scholarly Resource Services
Surfing the data waves:
driving change and
exploring the
possibilities

Surfing the data waves: driving
change and exploring the possibilities
Craig Milne – Manager, Scholarly Resource & Library Campus Services
Kelly Johnson – Team Leader, Scholarly Resource Services

Griffith at a glance
 5 campuses (3 in Brisbane, Logan,
Gold Coast)
 50,000 current students
 8,500 international students
 Trimesters implemented 2017
 Multiple time periods across the
year
 3 Trimesters
 7 Study Periods/Sessions - OUA
 6 Teaching Periods - Griffith Online

Talis at Griffith
 Managed by centralised team – Scholarly Resource
Services (SRS)
 Supported by Library Technology Services and
Frontline Services
SRS
 Rollover lists each Trimester at Week 5 of previous
Trimester
 Rollover all lists, not just active courses
 Create new lists
 Manage electronic/copyright/newer editions referrals
 Use reports instead of Reviews for housekeeping
Academics
 Must re-request digitisations
 Add bookmarks and modify list structure
 Own their lists and responsible to update

Take off - catching the wave in
2016/17
Using all items report to try and push towards our 95% required and
recommended readings online KPI
 Targeted conversion p to e
 Informing discussion / negotiations with publishers
 Using data for bulk ordering / ISBN matching services
 Using data in deselection processes (950 tags)
 Using data to identify potential issues if resources were
cancelled or removed from aggregated collections
 Quickly assessing publisher offers comparing offer against lists
 Basic pivot tables for reporting number of courses, items, items
by type, etc.

In the whitewater
Caught the wave but there were issues still to be solved:
 KPI reporting – 95% Required and Recommended readings online (no
online flag)
 Managing the volume of data – we want to drop in at anytime on any
set of data without re-running reports
 Cleaning / improving the data to make it more usable
 Making data readily accessible for others to query
Wanted to be able to use our data more effectively to:
 Become smarter in our p to e strategies (more targeted)
 Influence a cultural shift in reading list creation and reading selection at
an academic level (using data to support policy and get more buy-in )

Duck diving into the data
 Data consultancy webinars
 Initial brief and 2 separate discussions (2 x 2hrs)
 Discussed our data options with TALIS
 Useful in understanding limitations of data
 Helpful to talk through the problems and solutions
 Understand the impact of our processes on the data
 Established data limitations (usage data / clicks)
 Established how to determine % online
 Identified datasets we needed to combine from TALIS systems
 Identified what data we needed that wasn’t in TALIS
 Worked out how to derive the conditional fields we required

Boards and manoeuvres
 Excel 2016 “Get and Transform”
 Tableau
 Query – Load and format data types
 Transform – Split columns, calculated columns, power query
 Merge Query – SQL type joins (No more VLOOKUP!)
 Conditional Columns - Online flag field populated based on
DOI, Web address and request data columns
 Custom columns – manipulating / transforming the data with
power query
 Split columns / Power Query - useful for stripping data and
building new columns for data matching (URL, Doc ID, etc.)

Carving the data waves
 We are now discovering new insights as we can
readily explore the data
 Report on KPI’s
 Create a story for Learning &Teaching
Committee, Schools and Academics that is
visual and doesn’t rely on pivot tables and
numbers alone.

Count of importance by time period

Available online by time period

Available online by time period OUA

Required online by time period

Recommended online by time period

Not Online by Importance / Type

Chapters and Books not online by School

Surf’s up
Cleanup projects for 2018
 Digitise previously blocked items (Australian
copyright law changed!)
 Non-requested digitisations – investigate and
target communication at school level
 Missing Importance tags - investigate and
target communication at school level
 Mistakes in resource types/ metadata - e.g.
websites with no URLs

Future directions
 Set up dashboard / access to data so staff can quickly pull info and reports
 Make the data accessible to the broader university and explore other uses
 Academic has already asked for data across all courses with a program
to work on standardising texts / readings
 Investigations into use of data for Bookshop
 Further analysis of the data
 Drill down into the data at School / Program level
 Use analysis to help drive cultural shift in resource selection
 Bring in usage data to tell the story of the physical and electronic resource
 Still want to see the dashboard data from Talis available as either additional
fields in all items report OR as a separate report with clear definitions
 Training staff in Excel “Get and Transform”

Talis Insight Asia-Pacific 2018 - Craig Milne and Kelly Johson, Griffith University

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