Clay Shirky, Fantasy Football, and Using Data to Glean the Future of

Library Collections

Greg Raschke and John Vickery,

North Carolina State University

Charleston Conference

November 3, 2010

Assumptions

Economics are not sustainable Collections budgets will not grow at rate of past 30 years Unit growth and growth in cost per unit are not sustainable

Need to lower costs of overall system Lower unit costs Use data and users to be more precise

Therefore collection practices and strategies must change This change will be hard – much reason for optimism

Supply-Side Collections Print-based, unpredictable

demand, and legitimate need for just in case collections

Lead to judging quality by size (as in the ARL rankings) and libraries were then held captive to this standard

Contributed to inelastic demand for journals and a combination of speculative and package buying

Use is secondary to size, dollars expended, and other input measures

Credit to David Lewis (http://ulib.iupui.edu/users/dlewis)

Supply-Side Can Not Continue

Demand-Driven Collections

Make information easily, widely, and cheaply available

Collections as drivers of research, teaching, and learning

To make special or unique collections held/managed by the library available to the user community and the world

Demand-Driven – Changing Practice Tension between time-honored role as custodians of scholarship

versus enabling digital environment for scholars Not just PDA – portfolio of approaches, but certainly more

responsive Utilize new tools and techniques to become advanced analysts Truly embrace evidence based decision making

Look at how collections are actually used, not at expressed need

Demand-Driven – More Assumptions Less tolerance for and less

investment in lower use general collections

Resource management based increasingly on use

Modify collecting based on changes in the actual use

Risks of doing nothing – newspapers

Demand-Driven – Assertions

Rewards of adapting – more used and vital than ever

Use based and user driven collecting models will take growing share of budget

Bet on numbers Bet on good and quick Put resources into enabling

digital environment for scholars and custodian role will come out of that strategy

Why So Much Data?

Data analysis is a key component in solving/managing: Increasing pressure for accountability Increasing capability to gather and analyze data Increasing precision in the way we build collections and expend

resources Advocacy

Changing practice and data analysis at NCSU

Serials Review 2009 – Open, Data-Driven, and Real-Time Analysis Standardized usage data

(where available) Bibliometrics - publication

data and citation patterns (e.g LJUR)

Impact factor and eigenfactor User community feedback via

interactive, database-driven applications

Weigh/calculate/quantify user feedback

Weigh price against multiple data points

Usage ((07 usage+08 usage/2)+(publications*10)+ (citations*5)+(Impact Factor)

Community Feedback ((Weighted Ranking x % Match) x Total # Rankings) + 0.1 x # of "1s“

Price/feedback value Price/use Merge results to filter out top

20% and bottom 20%

Looking closer – Finding balanceAn example - a closer look at print item usage

Traditional ILS reporting tools can make this difficult

Advanced analytical tools can help

What types of questions can we ask?

Should Patron-Driven records not purchased be purged after 2 years? How does print item usage break down? Do print items even get used?

If it’s not used after 2 years…Should PDA records

be purged?

Maybe…

We haven’t even hit 50% usage

But what if we take a longer view…

If it’s not used after 2 years…

Things begin to look different

Looking even closer… How does

print item use break down?

Single circ usage is consistently ~14%

Would this change in a PDA only world?

Expenditures to University Data

Expenditures to University Data

Expenditures to University Data

Expenditures to University Data

Measurable Uses of the Collection 2009/2010

Full-text journal downloads* 3,672,600

Database use 1,989,972

Print book circulations/renewals 525,430

Digital collections requests 471,403

E-books 149,815

Reserves** 327,267

Total Uses 7,136,487

* Includes use of NC LIVE full-text content** Includes textbook, print, and e-reserves usage

Measurable Uses of the Collection 2009/2010

Challenges

Have ability to be more precise, more used, and more relevant than ever – need to make the necessary changes

Apps are a risk – silo(ing) networked, web environment – connections where libraries can excel

Not enough data - still lack much of the comprehensive data we need – must improve quickly

Data can punish niche areas, disciplinary variation, and titles without data

Open resources impact ability to control and command data