Promoting Institutional Repositories via Visualizations: A Change-Point Study

This article examines whether implementing visualizations on an institutional repository webpage increases traffic on the site. Two methods for creating visualizations to attract faculty and student interest were employed. The first is a map displaying usage of institutional repository content from around the world. This map uses Tableau software to display Google Analytics data. The second method is a text mining tool allowing users to generate word clouds from dissertation and thesis abstracts according to discipline and year of publication. The word cloud uses R programing language, the Shiny software package, and a text mining package called tm. Change in the number of institutional repository website sessions was analyzed through change-point analysis.