LSS Student Projects: Previous Projects

The Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture (MoDA) is part of part of Middlesex University (see https://moda.mdx.ac.uk/). MoDA is an accessible research collection. Students, researchers and members of the public are welcome by appointment. MoDA has a substantive collection of designs, wallpapers, textiles, books and ephemera that relate to the home and domestic interior, with a primary focus on the British context, 1870-1960s. MoDA is committed to exploring the collections with their audiences, co-creating knowledge and understanding and using the collections to inspire creativity. They support and challenge audiences to learn with and from the collections, to demonstrate their learning in varied ways, and to feed that knowledge back into a shared knowledge base. Media platforms: Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, Vimeo, YouTube, Instagram, Figshare, Historypin

Some questions they would like to address:

• How can they measure MoDA’s effectiveness as a museum that is engaging audiences digitally?
• How can they capture the depth of engagement of different users through the website and social media platforms?
• What else can they infer from the navigation of users on the website?
• How can they tell from available data what proportion of their audience is from each of their target audience groups?
• How can they measure the impact of MoDA’s online platforms on users’ learning?
• How can they bring all the data from different sources (website, social media) together in one coherent dashboard/document to make it readable and relevant for MoDA’s aims?
• How effective are different platforms in reaching different user profiles?
• Does the data they have allow conclusions to be drawn? How might they make the data more useful, e.g. include narratives?
• How might they capture and showcase more qualitative data?

Skills required: Tableau, some familiarity with social media data.

Project 1 Print usage Project
There are two sets of data, the first summarises the printing each student makes on a weekly basis, the second set of data looks at the amount of printing has been done on each machine each week.
The key question to determine from the student printing data is to determine acceptable use. The limit should cover all the reasonable requirements a student needs, so they should never have to hit the limit if they use the service reasonably. Everything a student needs will be free but the costs to the University are also under control. The system will give a student a tool, so they can see what level their usage is and each account will be topped back up to the maximum every year.
The key question on the printer data is to determine the relative use of machine in their various positions so that machine could be moved around to get even usage, and therefore even wear. It would also be good to cross-check with heavy coursework hand in weeks.

Library Collections Project (x3)
Librarians must make a range of decision around the books that they must remove from the library, which books and ebooks to buy, what electronic resources to subscribe to. They have to take into account the academic requirements for course material, what is currently available and the costs amongst a range of other trade-offs.

Project 2 Kortext collection
Kortext is a platform for the delivery of core texts for each programme. The data is provided in weekly updates which summarises the students’ usage of books.
The basic question is to determine the patterns of usage by students of these ebooks, this will go towards understanding value for money of the ebook project.

Project 3 Library collection
The library has limited space in which to house thousands of books, many of these have to be withdrawn in order to create space for newer editions and new books. The librarians need a dashboard that will help them gain an overview of the entire collection and help determine which books are used the most and by whom and which books can be considered for withdrawal.
Data out of the Library management system goes back at least 10 years. A key task is to find those books whose usage as dropped off significantly in that time.

Project 4 Reading List
Each module should have a reading list with reference to the core text, books, ebooks, journal articles etc. It would help Librarians and the Collections team to have an easy means of linking module leaders (lecturers) to reading lists and determining which modules running in the current academic year have reading lists and who might be responsible for providing those lists.
Data from the Reading list platform is provided in a csv form and requires some preparation to be combined with module leader data that comes out of a different system for it to be used in Tableau.

Student Services Projects (x2)
Several student facing services are using an underlying system of creating and processing student queries as tickets, called Proretention. You will work together with the team that supports proretention and the appropriate student service team.

Project 5 SWAT
The Student welfare Advice team provide advice to students on a range of topics, they would like to know what the patterns in queries are throughout the year, the nature of those tickets and how long the take to complete typically

Project 6 ISAT
The International Student Advice team deal with those issues particular to the requirements of International students. They would like to know what the patterns in queries are throughout the year, the nature of those tickets and how long the take to complete typically

Project 7 Library Occupancy
There are two sources of data that are currently being used to determine how many people are and have been in the Shepard library. The first is comes from the card readers that give access to the library, and second is the turn style counts captured by reception staff from a turn style counter.
Both of these sets of data are very noisy and will require some preprocessing and cleaning in order to be analysed and the task would include combining these sets to provide a good enough picture of occupancy. The key task is to use these data to understand the trends in occupancy across the academic year and also the time of day. The first goal is to determine when the numbers in the library have acceded more than 1000 people.