Find out how Anglia Ruskin University have been using infographics to present Reading List data

Following their recent selection as winners of the Talis Innovation Award 2016,  the ReadingLists@Anglia Project Manager Christina Harbour from the University of Anglia Ruskin joined us on a webinar to show us how their team have been using infographics as a way of presenting data.

Christina is a member of the eDevelopment group and job shares with member of the marketing group within the library, they noticed that a lot of their library guides and marketing materials were very text oriented and this wasn’t a very effective way of getting information across. They had noticed infographics being used at events and thought it would be a good way to present the information.

Every 2 or 3 months the team must present and report to the university’s Learning and Teaching Assessment committee. They used an infographic to present data taken from Google Analytics, such as what lists are most viewed and how people access the lists. This was well received as a more visual way of getting the information across and the committee were keen for them to continue with this type of presentation.

The team found an infographic template that looked like a newspaper page to present ‘Exemplar Reading Lists’, which show best practice for using lists to give academics ideas for how to structure their lists and what to include.

In the New Year, to encourage academics to add all of their lists, the library team ran a competition across the departments. A hamper was sent to teams who had 100% of their lists online as this is something done by academics and not library staff at Anglia Ruskin University. The competition was promoted across their internal intranet and emailed to staff. A number of departments are now at 100% with an overall 94% compliance (Jan 2016). Christina told us their next challenge is to improve the quality of lists.

A useful infographic they created for new academics and library staff was a ReadingLists@Anglia workflow diagram. This is a simple 7 step workflow used as a jumping off point, which is followed up by more detailed workflow.

Christina recommended Venngage, but also recommended a list of other useful sites that have similar functionality. Venngage was chosen at Anglia Ruskin University as it works well with the Google Analytics data that they receive on a monthly basis.

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Have you been doing anything interesting with your Reading Lists that you would like to share? Send an email to services@talis.com and let us know!