Collection Development Toolbox October 10, 2008
Posted by Jenica Rogers in Collection Management, LISUG 2008, Statistics and Data, conferences.add a comment
State Of The Art Collection Development Tools
Kevin McCoy, Suffolk Community College
Reasons to use CD tools: IPEDs reports. Middle States reports. Other accreditation reports. Campus program reviews. Newsletters, PR. Annual reports. Analyze collection use. Analyze collection strengths. Make informed purchasing decisions. Build excellent collections!
What CD jobs do we want to do? Inventory. Analyze use. Analyze strengths. Compare collections to standards. Buy new, appropriate materials.
What Tools do we have on hand? Automated shelflists. Lost lists. “Checked-out forever” lists.
- Aleph: Shelf list Item05 report. What is SUPPOSED to be on the shelf?
- Aleph: Shelf Reading Item04 report. What IS on the shelf?
- Aleph: Loan report Custom21: Anything with a due date that’s X ago (2 years, 5 years, etc; The things that Never Come Home, or may be claimed returned/on the shelf in error)
- (both require a lot of unskilled labor for checking data and skilled labor for cleanup!)
Other collection usage tools in Aleph: In house use report, breakdown of use by call number, cumulative stats for all circulations, most popular circulating items.
Other collection analysis tools: Aleph reports re: numbers in collection, Vendor tools, Comparisons to outside tools.
- Not much in Aleph. Custom 30 is a collection count per collection code, could run once per year to compare across years.
- WorldCat Collection Analysis: Identify unique holdings, compare against WorldCat, compare against peer institutions, lots of reports and graphs.
- Resources for College Libraries, the electronic successor to BCL. Created by Choice, ACRL, and Bowker. Qualitative, not quantitative.
- Bowker’s Book Analysis System: Can create custom output from Aleph (barcodes of the collection), upload, and will provide a report on matches, non-matches, to RCL. Easily navigable reports with reviewed recommendations for additions (based on non-matches). [but, as Jennifer notes, reduces uniqueness if you use only reviewed resources to build your collection -- we all buy the same thing, that way.]
- Books in Print: another good tool for anaylsis and discovery.
Kevin cautions us to use tools safely. Professional judgement is absolutely vital to interpreting the data provided by the tools, or the data can lead you astray. A collection that isn’t circulating may not be a bad collection; it may be victim to bad cataloging, or a course not being offered for a year or so, or… anything unique to your campus. Stay aware of multiple factors. But avoid paralysis by analysis — don’t lose yourself in data analysis and fail to act!
connecting the dots July 18, 2008
Posted by Jenica Rogers in Collection Management, Libraries, Statistics and Data, Users.1 comment so far
I’m a data girl. I’ve spent my entire career evangelizing for using the information available to us in quantitative ways to inform our decisions about services and resources. In libraries, there’s a lot of data to choose from — cataloging stats, circulation numbers, ILL transactions (borrowing and lending), website statistics, gate counts, reference transactions, costs of resources across disciplines, and on, and on, and on. What I believe is even more important than those internal counts is the external data — demographics of our user base, studies by outside agencies about technology saturation among Americans of all ages, and institutional data.
Today, I’m up to my eyeballs in institutional data — what we call the “Departmental Profile Trends”. We use it to inform our monographic allocations — there’s value, we have decided, in understanding how many students are enrolled in classes in each of our subject areas, and at which level of course, which, we assert, has an affect on what depth and breadth of materials are needed in each subject area. The DPT can give me that data — credit hours, FTE, and course level, by department.
The correlation between this data and monographic purchasing isn’t perfect, of course; even if a department teaches only graduate-level courses, they do not automatically then need monographs at a higher rate than departments teaching mainly 100-level classes. This is only one data point on a long spectrum of data about how information needs are developed and met in an academic program. But it’s useful, as far as it goes, and more than that, it’s interesting.
Right now, I have at my fingertips the data on how many students enrolled in upper division Psychology classes. How many students took classes in Special Education. The breakdown of courses taught last year in the Crane School of Music. And that’s interesting.
And I have to wonder about broader ways to apply it to our work. Reference training, for one. Information Literacy targeting, for another. Special events programming, yet another… And there are surely more, if we stop to think about it. This information draws us an outline of our user population — it doesn’t color it in, or show us the unique personalities and highlights, but it’s an outline.
How can we use that?
Millenial Mythology April 7, 2008
Posted by Jenica Rogers in Libraries, Statistics and Data, Users, cil2008, conferences.5 comments
Millenial Mythology: Putting suppositions to the test in an academic library, from Pascal Lupien, Academic Liaison Librarian, University of Guelph, and Randy Oldham, System Support Technician, University of Guelph
Questions: What percentage of students
- Own PDAs
- Use their cell phone to get the internet
- Participate in a virtual world
- Use a social network
- Use these for academic purposes
(the audience was calling out responses to each, such as 5% own PDAs, ALL use social networks. The shouted answers sounded pretty standard to me, but let’s see what the data tells us is true on their campus…)
- Own PDAs – 9%
- Use their cell phone to get the internet – 69% own. 72% can browse internet, only 17% had done so. (So, should we REALLY be moving our services to mobile platforms? Are they REALLY going to use them if we do?)
- Use a chat application? 93% did. Do you use it academically? YES.
- Use a social network? Most do. 50% never use for academic work. 35% used only on a few projects. Data skews younger; the younger the user, the more they use networks for academic work. Focus groups show they prefer email for group project work, and don’t want to share work online with strangers – only with friends. “Why should I share information with people who haven’t done the work?”
- Participate in a virtual world? 4% say yes. Second Life is not reaching students.
- Play online games? 42% never. 20%+ less than once per month. With a gender gap — many more men say yes. (So do we really need to integrate online gaming technology in our teaching and learning?)
They also asked about where students go to find information, and learned from surveys that many more students than expected went to the library’s sites — homepage, indexes, etc — first, rather than Google, knowing that the good information is in the library — but that the library resources were the hardest and most frustrating to use. (So you start off pleased that they use the library then get sad because they don’t like us.)
Discussion points to pull from this data:
- Technology is everywhere, but they may not be using it the way we assume they do or predict they will. How will this change? What services should we be digging into?
- Student culture is reluctant to mix personal and academic computing. Therefore, what’s the appropriate way for us to work with social networking as use increases and the personal/academic divide (possibly) grows?
- If students are using the library in large numbers, how do we improve access to address their concerns? How do we make more efficient search tools, and user-friendly websites?
- Are we looking for technology to sell to make us cool, or technology that fits a need? Explore what we can offer, but make sure that it actually meets a local need.
Observational study of students’ natural research behavior on existing assignments, from John Law, Director, Strategic Alliances & Platform Management, ProQuest.
Most observational sessions happened in coffee shops and apartments, with far fewer in computer labs and libraries. “You have to go native” so sat on beds in student bedrooms, etc — wherever they were, the observers were.
- How students decide which resources to use – library outreach/marketing (great anecdote about student who was “walking advertisement” for libraries with “resources too expensive for us to access otherwise” etc — because a librarian came to his class to tell them that), course instructor (what the professor says is the bible for research – even if a faculty member in a totally different subject area said it was a good resource), brand awareness
- How students ues library resources – vast majority of participants attempted to use library resources. But many failed, even though they wanted to, due to the state of websites. Once they’re in databases, they seem to succeed, but they can’t always figure out how to get there. Students often work with multiple resources at the same time, but abstracts are essential in identifying relevant search results. “Even when the full-text is present, they use abstracts as a reliable summary to decide whether something is relevant.”
- How students are really using google – “studies show 90% of students use google for research” but maybe we should be asking better questions… we all use google, but is it our primary tool? And is that what gets asked? Some use it as a primary search tool, some to supplement research, and most to do handy look-ups. When we ask “Who uses google for research”, how much of that is for handy look-ups? Who uses Google for primary search? Students for whom it will suffice – if quality isn’t a concern, then google will suffice. Students who are insufficiently aware of library e-resources. Students who’ve had bad experiences with library resources. “Students are pretty smart about using different research tools for different reasons.” (Just like us. This is also how we search; why we think they’re radically different than we are is a mystery to me.)
- How social networking sites factor into student research – they don’t. “We stopped asking this question because they were laughing at us.”
- Chief inhibitors to success – Lack of awareness of resources. Significant difficulty navigating library websites. When the catalog search is front-and-center, they want to use it for ANY search. Authentication provides barriers.
Audience question on “how can I apply all this to baby boomers?” And the answer from all 3 was “be seamless, be better, be more available” — no matter who your audience is. Identify the best technology and use it to address expressed user needs. “People say ‘Your websites are crap’, and we have to fix that.”
(This was one of the best presentations I’ve seen in a long while — personable presenters with good anecdotes to support their information, concise, and relevant. Thanks, guys!)
Jenica Rogers
