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Data Dashboards

The Data Dashboards present interactive data visualizations for key metrics in several areas including staffing, expenditures, collections, services, and hours of operation. The charts will be updated annually, and new charts added, as future trends data becomes available.

This resource explains how to navigate the dashboards, including interpreting the visualizations, navigating dashboard tabs, applying filters, and viewing tooltips.

 

Summary

A summary dashboard is available to all Benchmark users. The charts displayed on the homepage when you login contain three data points: your library (in purple), all average (in teal), and all median (in green). This includes aggregate data from all libraries that responded and includes responses from all Carnegie classes

At the bottom of the summary page, you will see charts of Trends data from the most recent year’s survey.

 

‌Data Dashboards (subscribers)

Subscribers have access to an interactive suite of data dashboards organized by area of focus within the Standards for Libraries in Higher Education. Navigate between tabs using the bar across the top of the page.

Summary

Effectiveness

Education

Discovery

Collections

Space

Leadership

Personnel

Report

These are the topics by which the visualizations are organized:

• Summary: Selected key metrics from the ACRL Trends & Statistics Survey, including trends data for the most recent year. This has the same charts as the homepage, but with the addition of filters and interactive features.
• Institutional Effectiveness: data that can be used to analyze institution effectiveness and apply findings for purposes of continuous improvement.
• Educational Role: data that can be used to demonstrate how libraries partner in the educational mission of the institution to develop and support information-literate learners can discover, access, and use information effectively for academic success, research, and lifelong learning
• Discovery Support: data that can be used to demonstrate how libraries enable users to discover information in all formats through effective use of technology and organization of knowledge.
• Collections: data that can be used to demonstrate that libraries provide access to collections sufficient in quality, depth, diversity, format, and currency to support the research and teaching missions of the institution.
• Space: data that can be used to demonstrate that libraries are the intellectual commons where users interact with ideas in both physical and virtual environments to expand learning and facilitate the creation of new knowledge.
• Institutional Management/Administration/Leadership: data that can be used to demonstrate how library leaders engage in internal and campus decision-making to inform resource allocation to meet the library’s mission effectively and efficiently.
• Personnel: data that can be used to demonstrate how libraries provide sufficient number of quality of personnel to ensure excellence and to function successfully in an environment of continuous change.
• Report: this is where you will be able to build a custom report (see “Creating Report” resource for more detail).

Many of the charts on the other data dashboards available to subscribers show two data points: your library (in purple) and all institutions (in teal). This is intended to aid peer comparisons. Some charts visualize data over time or use another type of appropriate visualization.

Data Filters

The Data Dashboards comes with a range of filters (pictured below) designed to facilitate the creation of effective peer comparisons.

The Carnegie classification and Carnegie classification detailed filters allow you to select the type of postsecondary institution being used for comparison purposes. Definitions of the classifications can be found here.

The county and state/province filers allow you to filter the data by geographic location. Charts where data is not available for a given geographic area will appear blank. The dashboards default to showing data for the United States.

Control of institution indicates whether the institution is private for-profit, private not-for-profit, or public; those categories are mutually exclusive. Special designation indicates whether an institution is a Historically Black College or University (HBCU), Hispanic-serving institution (HSI), land-grant institution, minority-serving institution (MSI), Tribal college or university, or women’s college or university. These fields are derived from the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education dataset.

The survey year filter defaults to “most recent.” This means all the charts on the dashboard will show data from the most recent year available. If you change the year filter to a single year, only data from that year will be displayed. Charts where data is not available for that year will appear blank.

The peer group filter allows for changes to peer group comparisons. If you have created custom peer groups these will appear as options. See the “Creating a Custom Peer Group” resource for more information.

 

‌Tooltips

Hover your mouse over a visualization to see a tooltip with the numerical value. This also includes a note on the survey question used as the source for this visual. For charts based on ratios, the tooltip will include both the source of the numerator and denominator values used to calculate the ratio, as shown in the image below.

‌Drill through

New in August 2024, subscribers can “drill-through” from the dashboard visuals to underlying institution-level data. To drill through from a chart, hover over or right-click on the data point you are interested in and select Drill through > Report.

This will take you to the Report tab. It has a table with the name of each institution and their survey response for the data point you clicked on. If you applied any filters to the All institutions’ data (e.g., Carnegie classification, peer group), those filters remain selected on drill through so you will only see institutions to which those characteristics apply.

Using drill through applies filters to the database in the backend that are not visible to the end user. This means that if you drill through to the Report tab, then navigate back to the other dashboards, and come back to the Report tab, the table will still have those same drill through filters applied. Refreshing the page or applying a new drill through will remove the previous drill through filters.

You can also use the Report tab without using drill through. See the “Creating a Report” resource to learn more.