Tag Archives: collection development

Library collection evaluation – LIANZA 2023

Ivy Guo and James Bagshaw, Victoria University of Wellington
James evaluates collections by looking at usage stats. Mostly online as 97% of collection budget is for electronic resources.
Combine everything, gather usage statistics, determine a cost-benefit, and seek feedback – this is a cycle. They mostly use COUNTER reports where available. Can look at usage on the book/journal level, and also on the article/chapter level. Database reports include multimedia stats (where the title-level ones don’t). “Investigations” are where someone’s looked at eg the metadata, abstract, preview. The “request” is for full-text view/download (or in the case of multimedia, where the item is played for at least 10 seconds. Lots of info at the COUNTER website.
Good practice – standardised reports, good records management, and combine data into one place as much as possible. Excel does provide a lot of power to do this eg with pivot tables and formulae. (“It’s not my best friend but I’m on quite good terms with it.”)
How do we evaluate Open Access? 80% of OA usage is currently not tracked (according to COUNTER). “Global Item Report” might help track this so can measure not just institution usage but also wider “world” usage.

Ivy points out “there is such thing as too much data”. How do we read it all and find the useful thread in it to tell the story. You need to have your questions in mind first then look at the data. It also needs to be presented in a meaningful way to stakeholders.
In decision-making: “Be bold” which doesn’t mean reckless, but we’ve got the skills, we’ve done the consultation, so “trust the data and trust the process”.

James notes data often presents more questions than answers. Sometimes you see usage stats are low and discover your authentication system isn’t set up correctly!

Links of Interest 30/3/2012 – article linker, impact factors of open access journals, and more

Leave a reply

Customer service
UConn Discovers What Students Want From Their Library – too complex for a pull quote, follow the link for a summary.

Two solutions for increasing the usability of that blasted Article Linker page:

simple and sweet
more complex and risky (if you’re not a code geek, skip the discussion/coding examples and just scroll to the bottom for the “after” screenshot)

Open Access
JQ at the University of Oregon writes about High-impact open access journals and includes some invaluable tables of OA journals ranked by SJR, SciMago, and Eigenfactor impact factors. These (sorted by subject) could be useful for promoting OA to departments and to students graduating from university who still want to keep up with research.

Positioning Open Access Journals in a LIS Journal Ranking looks at OA journals in the library science field:
This research uses the h-index to rank the quality of library and information science journals between 2004 and 2008. Selected open access (OA) journals are included in the ranking to assess current OA development in support of scholarly communication. It is found that OA journals have gained momentum supporting high-quality research and publication, and some OA journals have been ranked as high as the best traditional print journals. The findings will help convince scholars to make more contributions to OA journal publications, and also encourage librarians and information professionals to make continuous efforts for library publishing.

Data curation
Demystifying the data interview: Developing a foundation for reference librarians to talk with researchers about their data
As libraries become more involved in curating research data, reference librarians will need to be trained in conducting data interviews with researchers to better understand their data and associated needs. This article seeks to identify and provide definitions for the basic terms and concepts of data curation for librarians to properly frame and carry out a data interview using the Data Curation Profiles (DCP) Toolkit.

Subscription statistics
Subscriptions in Context (powerpoint) is a clear and elegant presentation for University of Central Oklahoma library faculty liaisons on all the factors the Serials department considers when evaluating subscriptions.

Just for fun
A Library Society of the World thread began, “Gregor Samsa awoke from uneasy dreams to find he had been transformed into a monstrous librarian” and went on from there.

Bibliographic analysis for fun and collection development