Moving Forward with Analytics

by Kathleen McEvoy (EBSCO Information Services) <kmcevoy@ebsco.com>

and John McDonald (EBSCO Information Services) <johnmcdonald@ebsco.com>

In the two years since John McDonald and I started editing a column on analytics and the role they play in the future of libraries, we have had librarians and library vendors weigh in on studies, test cases, and new resources. These efforts are designed to help libraries better understand their holdings, highlight the value and impact of libraries, and showcase how analytics can promote evidence based decision making.

With this special issue, we are looking to continue to reveal the

data-driven library and provide librarians a window into how their peers are leveraging analytics to adjust collections and services at their libraries.

The first two articles are fascinating case studies on how librarians have analyzed data to make operational changes to their book approval plans. In the first, Adam Beauchamp at Florida State University describes their process to evaluate monographic ordering by combining a variety of demand-based metrics (ILL, Circ, Resource Sharing) and use of ratios to normalize values across subject groups with vastly different numbers of observations. In the second article, Jennifer Mezick and Louis Becker from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville share their method to evaluate and revise their approval plan using analytics. Their approach features the combination of data from the ILS and COUNTER combined with demographic data about overall book publishing to evaluate the appropriate print to eBook ratios for their approval plan. The differing approaches each offer interesting insight into new methods of collection development. continued on page 8