Proving our worth: using annual reports to engage with academics

This paper will provide a practical example of how relatively easy it is to produce high quality annual reports, despite potential financial, technical or organisational constraints. The Academic Librarians at Leeds Beckett University have for years written annual reports summarising the resources, teaching and support that each Faculty or School has received from the library. Historically these have been very text-based and received little or no reaction from the academics who read them (if they were being read at all). In 2016 it was decided that it was time for a re-design of the reports to make them more visually appealing and to turn them into a tool for engaging with our wider academic community. Like all HE libraries, we collect more qualitative and quantitative data than ever before, measuring how our library and its resources are being used. We need to ensure, however, that we present this information in a meaningful way to our stakeholders. How do we use this information to demonstrate that we are effective? We need to ask the right questions of the data to measure our impact, analyse it correctly and present it in a way that makes sense. It is extremely important to contextualise this information to increase impact and to prove our worth to our academic colleagues. The prevalence of tools to create infographics and analytical dashboards also means that we need to decide which technology we should use to create the reports so that they look professional but are easy to produce by individual Academic Librarians with varying technical abilities. This paper will show you how and why we decided to use PowerPoint at Leeds Beckett to create simple but visually appealing reports that have received fantastic feedback from our academics (who, it seems, are finally reading them!).