ABSTRACT
An assessment team at the Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University applied new techniques to create visualisations that provide more compelling, relatable, and accessible representations of collection usage. Involving library staff across many departments, several projects were conducted using different software and required the development of a system to map the underlying data to Library of Congress classification and shelf range numbers. The underlying data needed significant curation and cleaning, but the resulting visualisations quickly reveal a pattern that is much more difficult to identify from thousands of lines on a spreadsheet. These new techniques have served as a catalyst for more effective evaluation of materials in the general and reference collections.
