Notes on Operations: Visual Representation of Academic Communities through Viewshare

Abstract

This paper discusses how the Viewshare web application was used to generate and customize unique, dynamic views of data about faculty members in a large public university, specifically their areas of research and other data such as PhD granting institutions, location of the PhD granting institutions, Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) authority records, and gender. Viewshare, as a visualization platform, enabled the author to discover the departments’ strengths and consider how the results could be used to benefit the library, students, and specific departments. Viewshare also enabled the author to show patterns and trends with graphics instead of volumes of text.