From Aleph to Data Warehouse to Tableau: Making sense of our data

Abstract

As part of their five year strategic initiative, New York University Libraries embarked on an ambitious plan to create a Library data warehouse and to use the data collected therein to become a more data driven organization. To achieve this goal, IT staff utilized Microsoft’s Enterprise level ETL (Extract ,Transform and Load) software offered as part of SQL Server. Known as SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), this suite of tools allows one to connect to and extract data from, almost any available data source, including text files, Excel data, as well as data stored in Oracle, MySQL and SQL Server databases. Having begun the task of building a data warehouse to store mission critical data, the next step was to find a way to present that data to decision makers and other information stake holders. After researching a variety of options, the choice was made to go with Tableau, a powerful data visualization software package. In our presentation we would like to demonstrate how we use SSIS to pull and combine data from a wide variety of sources including Aleph, the University FAME and student registry systems into the Library data warehouse. We also plan to show how we employ Tableau to analyze and present this data.