A series of pioneering projects using ‘data visualisation’ techniques to show how public services are used and what people feel about them was unveiled this month by Leicestershire County Council.
Leicestershire is working on the projects with City University London’s ‘giCentre’ (http://www.gicentre.org), a geographical information research unit. An initial five-month project, now complete, has been testing visualisation techniques to help policymakers analyse residents’ library usage.
Interactive graphical formats were used to link a database of 450,000 lending records from 54 libraries to user household addresses, helping managers to see how borrower location, library size, transport links and other factors might affect service take-up (see http://bit.ly/6OPMiX ).
Examples of visualisation techniques used include a ‘Tree map’ ( http://bit.ly/giCentre_Tree_Map ) built up of blocks, whose size and colour reflect key data points such as geographical location and frequency of library use. A separate ‘flow map’ ( http://bit.ly/8VzhwB ) uses clusters of lines to show how far people are travelling to each library.
The results allow complex data and systems to be analysed in far more effective ways than poring over tables of figures, Robert Radburn, Research Manager at Leicestershire, told E-Government Bulletin. “How do you go about looking through 450,000 records?”
The charts could help library managers spot patterns which could suggest which services are doing well and which are under-performing, Radburn said. “Certain areas have higher or lower than expected use, in some areas people travelling a lot further than once thought. We can ask – why is this library doing better than that?”
The council is already beginning a further service data visualisation project: the creation of a public website to display a range of information about council services and spending alongside customer satisfaction survey data. The new work – also with the giCentre – is supported by £32,000 of funding from the Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG) as part of its ‘Timely information to citizens’ initiative, and will include data from Leicestershire’s ‘Place Survey’, a poll of citizens’ views now required to take place in all local government areas in England every two years ( http://bit.ly/5c9BiK ).
The county hopes to extend visualisation techniques even wider in due course and is investigating possibilities for funding for projects in other service areas as well, Radburn said.
NOTE: Leicestershire is holding a workshop on its libraries data visualisation project on 3 March at Loughborough University. For more information email: robert.radburn@leics.gov.uk
NOTE: Article originally published in E-Government Bulletin issue 302.
Click here to visit/return to issue 302 index
