1. Tableau Data Visualizations and Collection Analysis for Shared Print
PAN Forum
ALA Annual - June, 2018
Susan Stearns, Project Director
Thank you Matthew.

2. 60 institutions in 11 states from Maine to Florida
Over 9 million monographs retained
9k+ serials/journal holdings retained
Just a reminder on what the Eastern Academic Scholar’s Trust- EAST – is.
We are a shared print initiative, which began with monograph retention commitments and is now involved in serials and journals work as well.
Here you see the current map of EAST member institutions, stretching from Maine to Florida. There are currently 60 EAST members in 11 states.
The libraries shown in red and pink are the 47 members of Cohort 1. Our 13 Cohort 2 libraries are shown in green. Across these 60 libraries, we have retention commitments for over 9 million monographs.
Last year we began work with a subset of EAST members on serials and journals retention and will be committing more than 9,000 holdings later this year.
I will be focusing this presentation on the data visualization work we have been doing in support of our serials and journals work.

3. What is Tableau? An interactive data visualization tool
Visual encoding of data allows it to be presented in a variety of ways
Interactivity with the data supports exploration and discovery
Increasingly popular tool for libraries as part of ongoing assessment work
Available in a variety of ways including a free, public version
For those of you not familiar with Tableau, it is an interactive data visualization tool that allows you to upload data in a variety of formats and encode it for presentation as well as interact with it to support exploration and discovery.
Many libraries are using Tableau already as part of a variety of different types of assessment work
One advantage of Tableau is that there is a fee, public version which is what we have used for EAST

4. Using Tableau for Collection Analysis
EAST worked with Center for Research Libraries (CRL) to analyze overlap and uniqueness of serials and journals holdings for 21 of our Cohort 1 retention partners
Using the provided holdings from the libraries, CRL developed a series of spreadsheets for EAST
We had been spoiled using GreenGlass for monograph collection analysis and wanted a way to visualize the spreadsheet data
Sara Amato, Data Librarian, uploaded the holdings overlap data into Tableau for modeling
We are working with CRL on the collection analysis for serials and journals. Using holdings provided by the libraries, CRL develops a series of spreadsheets for EAST that focus on overlap and uniqueness of holdings
In our first round of work with CRL, which is just reaching completion, 21 of the EAST libraries participated
As we began to look at the spreadsheets provided to us, we realized we had been spoiled by using GreenGlass for our monograph collection analysis and wanted some ways to visualize the dense and complex spreadsheet data as well as think about how to model retention
Sara Amato, the EAST data librarian, began to become familiar with Tableau and uploaded the CRL spreadsheet overlap data into Tableau

5. Goals
Provide an easier to use view into the collective EAST serials/journals collection
Simplify libraries’ ability to review widely held titles to eliminate those deemed inappropriate for retention
Allow us to focus on groups of titles held by different numbers of EAST member libraries
Once we agreed the the initial retention model, simplify the process of review of title lists by libraries
We had a number of goals in using Tableau as part of our serials and journals work
We wanted to get a higher level view into the collective data
We hoped to simplify the libraries’ ability to review the widely held titles more easily so we could eliminate those deemed inappropriate for retention
We wanted to be able to easily focus on groups of titles held by different numbers of EAST member libraries as part of our modeling
And, once we had our initial retention model in place, we wanted it to be reasonably easy for the libraries to review the titles

6. Total title holdings by library Boston College = 29,787
Faceted displays
Total title holdings by library
Boston College = 29,787
Here you see a sample screen shot from one of the two Tableau visualization sets that Sara created for us to work with
The set focused on presenting the full collective data by various facets – you see some of them listed across the top of this screen shot – Total Holdings by Library – which is what you see here; Overlap across the collection, LC class analysis, Pub Year analysis, etc.
These visualizations provided us with an easy to understand presentation of the collective data set, allowing us to get a sense of the totality of the holdings across the participating libraries as well as the ability to drill down to understand similarities and differences
In all cases, you can hover over a library name or another aspect of the visualization and see more details Here I’ve identified Boston College in the display, which had a total of 29,787 serials and journal holdings as part of the analysis, obviously one of the larger collections

7. Group holdings overlap Of the 112,564 EAST titles,
75,713 – or 67% were held
by a single EAST library
This is an example from the overlap visualization and shows what you see when you hover over a column. This shows that 75,713 titles- of the grand total of 112,564 titles in the EAST data set – have a single holder in EAST. That represents about 67% of the holdings, so a high level of uniqueness.
Of these, only 568 were in JSTOR at the time we did this analysis but 14,400 (or almost 20%) were represented in the PAPR database.
The arrow on the right points to a list that allows you to specify the number of holders you want to investigate. This allows use to experiment with different models for retention.

8. Same display limited to titles held by 4-6 EAST libraries
And here you see an example of the display when you limit the number of holders.
In this case, we have specified we want to limit to tiles held by 4, 5 or 6 EAST libraries
Drilling down using these Tableau visualizations made it much easier for us to begin to focus our efforts on agreeing to a model for retention.

9. The non-English languages represented in the serials/
And here is a final example from the first set of Tableau visualizations we used for analysis
Sara used the MARC data to create a number of facets to analyze the serials holdings. While none of this fed directly into our collection analysis, it did give us insight into the characteristics of the collective collection.
This shows a representation of the non-English languages represented in the data set
The non-English languages
represented in the serials/
journals data set

10. Slider on screen allows you to specify the number of holding libraries you wish to see totals for and to specify whether or not JSTOR titles should be included
Here you see an example from the second way we used Tableau – to drill down in more detail and actually look at title lists
This screen shot is from the Totals by Library tab which shows the total number of titles as well as holdings for each of the participating EAST serials and journals retention partners
A slider on the right of the screen allows you to interact with the totals and specify that you wish to see totals for titles held by a certain number of EAST libraries – in this case we are looking again at titles and holdings held by at least 4 and not more than 6 EAST libraries
Since we were also interested in excluding titles in JSTOR from our retention model, Sara added the ability to include or exclude JSTOR titles as well. In the future, we may add other facets to this.
The display indicates that total number of titles and holdings each of the libraries would be expected to retain based on the 4-6, excluding JSTOR model. This ended up being our final model for the first group of 20 participating libraries.

11. Title lists – the 4-6 holdings of Boston College Can be directly
downloaded
Here you see a screen shot of the Titles tab which allows you to see – and download – a list of titles that meet the specified criteria.
We’re looking at the list of 2,629 titles owned by Boston College that fall into the held by 4-6 EAST libraries model
Again – on the right you see the slider and list that allow you to interact and select different individual libraries or groups of libraries
Since Tableau allows you to download content, Sara set this up to allow each EAST library to directly access their title lists once we had agreed to the retention model

12. How we used Tableau
Allowed Serials/Journals Working Group to look at collective data in one place rather than having to scroll through large and complex spreadsheets
Facilitated modeling of different retention options
Like GreenGlass, Tableau was the source for libraries to download lists for review
As I mentioned earlier, our primary use of Tableau was to allow our Serials and Journals Working Group to look at the collective data in one place instead of having to scroll through the large and complex spreadsheets that were originally output
We used the Tableau displays to facilitate experimenting with different retention models for serials and journals and with the ability to interact directly with the data in Tableau. This allowed us to come close to replicating some of the model building capabilities we so valued in our work in GreenGlass on the monograph side
And, like GreenGlass, Tableau could then be used as the source for libraries to download title and holdings information for review, giving them a central location to work from

13. Next Steps
Cohort 1 retention titles undergoing final review and the approximately 9,000+ titles committed for retention added to the EAST Retentions Database as well as PAPR (and eventually the Rosemont data within PAPR)
Continuing to work with CRL on a second round of serials/journals retentions with 31 EAST libraries
Will use Tableau in a similar way to visualize the data and facilitate collection analysis
In terms of next steps, we are now finalizing retention commitments from the original 20 libraries which we expect will be over 9,000. As they undergo final review, we are uploading them to the PAPR database and will be adding them to our EAST retentions database
We have also begun work with CRL on a second round of analysis and have added 11 new libraries for a total of 31
We anticipate using Tableau in a similar way to visualize the data that CRL will provide us for this second group to facilitate our analysis and retention modeling

14. sstearns@blc.org www.eastlibraries.org .
I want to thank Sara Amato in particular for her work in developing our Tableau visualizations. That work has been critical to allowing us to move forward with serials and journals work as quickly as we have.
Do I have time for any questions?