E-Resources Analysis

[Courtney Heatley]

Hello,

I am not sure if this is the right forum for this, if not, please ignore or pass along to the appropriate group or person.

I have been collecting E-Resources usage statistics using COUNTER 5 in both Alma Analytics and Springshare's LibInsight. We would like to create something that would not only  collect the usage, but also report the cost per use and allow us to track how much we are spending per department. We would also like to compare the resources we subscribe to, to the enrollment data of students enrolled in the programs the resource is geared towards. While I understand we can do some or parts of this in Alma Analytics or LibInsight, there are a few issues.

1. We are a multi-campus university. Each campus has it's own SUSHI credentials for Counter 5 and it does not translate well in LibInsight.

2. We do not use the Acquisitions module in Alma Analytics.

3. I have already reached out to our system IT team to see if we could create something and they do not have the library expertise, bandwidth, or personnel to focus on this type of project. I offered some open source resources to build upon, but it fell flat in the water.

Has anyone else tackled something like this in the past or know of anyone who could point me in the right direction? 

Thanks,

Courtney Heatley

Interim Director of North Hall Library

Commonwealth University Libraries

Commonwealth University

[Harker, Karen]

Courtney – COUNTERmetrics.org provides a list of harvester tools that you could investigate using. 

 

If the campus libraries already harvest their own usage data in a consistent manner, then what you may need more is a tool for gathering the, well, harvests in one place.  This is more a job for data management systems, such as a database or online data systems, like Airtable or Power BI (if your campus has access).  Even having a shared drive to which your campus libraries could save their spreadsheets could serve as a rudimentary system.  If you want to pursue consolidating the usage data gathering, Celus, EBSCO and Clarivate offer services for this, for a price, of course.  Or you could implement your own solution, but I suggest you start with tools you already have and can use.  You can always upgrade.

 

Incorporating costs is likely going to be the harder of the two problems to solve.  That will depend on how your libraries pay for the resources.  If they are managed as separate entities, then you could request that they provide costs expended in a standard format, like a spreadsheet with a resource identifier, coverage period, and cost.  Matching the resources from usage reports to the inventory systems is a huge gap in the data pipeline.  The identifiers provided in usage reports may or may not align with what are available in the inventory systems.  In addition, there are a variety of pricing models that slice, dice, and combine content in a myriad of ways, making matching the amount paid for any one title to be difficult to calculate.  Traditional subscriptions of one-price to one-title for one year makes only about a third of our renewable resources that we provide. 

 

I hope this helps.

 

Karen R. Harker

Collection Assessment Librarian

University of North Texas Libraries

Denton, Texas 75287

Karen....@unt.edu

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