Developing a STEM Outreach Plan with Data Viz

As an academic liaison librarian serving a wide range of departments in the STEM fields, there are many competing priorities. My goal in developing strategic planning matrices for STEM outreach is to move away from a reactionary service approach to one that is proactive and evidence based. Mapping the current assessment goals of the university, colleges, and departments I serve, alongside the Libraries’ initiatives to support student and faculty research, information literacy, open-access and scholarly communications endeavors, has been a large but worthwhile undertaking. To pilot the project, data for the College of Engineering and Computer Science was collected into Excel. The complexity of the information collected and the ability to visualize overlapping priorities could not adequately be represented with Excel tables. Multiple Excel files are being combined in Tableau Public to create visualizations such as matrices, heat maps, and treemaps. Upon completion of the project, detailed methods for data collection and templates for creating visualizations in Tableau Public will be shared openly.