The UK electronic information Group (UKeiG) is pleased to announce a repeat of its popular half-day online CPD course ‘Data Visualisation for librarians, information and knowledge professionals’ between 1 pm and 4 pm on Tuesday 2nd December 2025.

Book now: https://www.cilip.org.uk/events/EventDetails.aspx?id=2002916&group=201314

Overview

Data Visualisation - the representation, interpretation and understanding of data through graphics - offers invaluable opportunities to transform your datasets and communicate complex research outputs and quantitative information to a much wider audience. It can surface insightful and compelling context and enables you to explore data relationships not immediately apparent using traditional statistical methods and analysis.

It is crucial to understand the opportunities open access tools can offer in visualising data. The library, information and knowledge sector is data-rich, regularly collating statistics to evidence service value and impact and advise decision makers. This data may take the form of library usage and stock circulation statistics, utilisation of digital content, satisfaction surveys and user experience studies, for example. Open data science and linked data are an integral part of Open Science and Open Access, and Artificial Intelligence is built on data literacy, management, validity and integrity.

This course will introduce and explore data visualisation theory and applications with advice and tips throughout.

Spreadsheet software (Microsoft Excel, for example) still has value as a default data application of choice. The course will review its benefits before introducing delegates to a portfolio of open source and free data visualisation alternatives.

A key practical element of the course will include hands-on experience of setting up and working with the visual analytics platform Tableau using your own data. This will include cleaning and organising data, creating basic charts, plots and word clouds and integrating your outputs into a dashboard.

Who should attend?

This three hour course is ideal for any library, information and knowledge professional from senior managers through to early career professionals. It will also have relevance to researchers, research support staff and marketing and communication teams. Anybody who regularly authors publications, papers and reports or delivers presentations will benefit from these essential data visualisation skills.

The course will enable you to:

Ø  Consider the fundamentals of data visualisation as a data science communication tool

Ø  Understand visualisation as a significant analytical component to data analysis

Ø  Evaluate, critique and interpret visualisation design using traditional plot types like pie charts, bar charts, scatter plots and histograms. Are they relevant and fit for purpose?

Ø  Review the strengths and benefits of Excel

Ø  Explore alternative open source or free data visualisation applications, including Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio), Power BI, Seaborn, D3.js, Shiny

Ø  Visualise your data with a practical hands-on experience using Tableau

Ø  Explore further reading and resources

Ø  Consider next steps: taking lessons learned into the workplace.

Course leader

Suvodeep Mazumdar is a senior Lecturer in the Information School at the University of Sheffield. His primary research interest is Big Data Analytics and Crowdsourcing. He conducts inter-disciplinary research on highly engaging, interactive and visual mechanisms in conjunction with complex querying techniques for seamless navigation, exploration and understanding of complex datasets and has applies his research in various application domains (such as health informatics, smart cities, emergency response etc.)

Booking and payment

The course (including presentation slides and documentation) costs:

Ø  UKeiG/CILIP members £50 + VAT

Ø  Non-members £80 + VAT

Ø  Employer Partner staff £64 + VAT (Please contact your rep or email employerpartners@cilip.org.uk for the discount code)

Credit and debit cards are the preferred method of payment. Invoices are available on request using the online ‘Bill me’ option.