Circulation data can be useful for collection development librarians to identify usage trends among the faculty and students in their department. It can also be useful for decision makers to see broad patterns of usage by department, patron status, language and library location.
The Problem:
While the circulation data is available via the ILS, it is difficult for most librarians. The data query, download and processing in either a database or spreadsheet is beyond the skillset of many collection development librarians.
The Solution:
In order to make the data more accessible a database and website was created to provide simple access to basic circulation data by department and patron status.
A snapshot is taken of all items currently checked out on one day during the middle week of the quarter. This snapshot includes some basic information about the item and some non-identifiable information about the patron. This includes library holding location, call number, title, language, patron department and patron status.
The website was built using a combination of PHP and Perl. The website for snapshot circulation data is at:
http://depts.washington.edu/cdassess/circsnapshot/.
The website uses a series of screens to query the database and produce an initial cloud style display of LC classes.
From this LC Class cloud display the selector can click on any of the LC Classes to get a title list of items in that list.
This simple tools allows any collection development librarian to get a quick picture of what kind of material is being used by the faculty and students in any department.
In addition to the simple web based tool, queries can be run against the database to provide insight into other aspects of collection usage.
Further Analyses:
The inclusion of library location and patron status allows us to to further analysis on usage of a specific collection in the Libraries or usage patterns of on-campus versus off-campus borrowers.
Limitations:
Snapshot data has some natural limitations. Since it is a picture of just one point in time, it will not aggregate usage over a period of time. Also, because of the work required in querying and downloading the data from the ILS, it is not an on-demand service. The Innovative ILS provides some data analysis tools that address some of the limitations of the snapshot data.
