Collection Analysis

Owned by Sarah Holsapple
Last updated: May 30, 2024
3 min read

Scope: Description of programmatic collection analysis efforts

Contact: Sarah Holsapple

Unit: Collection Strategy & Development Department

Date last reviewed:7/12/2023

Date of next review: 7/12/2025




Collection Analysis Librarian Mission

The mission of a collection analysis librarian is to evaluate the library collection to see that the materials in the library support the needs of the library users (students, faculty, university) and coordinate with the institutional goals of the library and the university.

What does a Collection Analysis Librarian actually do?

In a nutshell, I can help to formulate questions about the library collection, and then find data to answer them - work with other librarians and interested parties to collect, analyze, and use data to evaluate the library collection.

How can we work together?

I want to know what questions you have about the library collection. Maybe you don’t have a specific question but have a decision coming up, or just want more information about a resource. I can help find and interpret some data to shed some light.




Data is a useful tool, but has limitations

Library collection curation is a complicated process. Librarians take into account so much more than data like cost and usage to decide how to build the collection. But still, data is a useful tool to help guide this work, especially when collections are so large and librarian time stretched so thin. 

Data is one tool that we have to make decisions about what materials to provide. Data can give us a wide view of the collection – how many things and what kind, and can zoom in on specific questions – how many materials in one specific call number range. We can compare two groups like usage vs cost-per-use. But data doesn’t know how to choose the most relevant materials, or how to decide what materials will meet user needs in the future.

This data isn’t neutral. Answers are based on the questions we think to ask, and the way that we ask them – those questions carry our biases with them. The data that we collect is influenced by the biases of the people who designed the systems in the first place (decisions about what metadata to collect reverberate today and limit us). Once we collect this data, we view it and analyze it through our own lens, from our own standpoint.

Data Sources

This section is a work in progress...

COUNTER usage data for electronic resources

Non-COUNTER e-resource usage data

ARC data - reports from Aleph - data about materials in the catalog, including circulation, budget, and bibliographic information and more.

Solr data - TRLN catalog holdings

Inter-Library Loan data

Library Website Analytics

Survey Data

Duke Library Collection Analysis Projects

FY 2023 E-Book and E-Journal Usage. This data is from FY 2023 COUNTER5 Usage reports. TR_B1 unique title requests for books and TR_J1 unique item requests for journals. 

Usage reported by providers does, of course, have limitations - a good review can be found at this Sparc* resource about cost per use by John Blosser and Rachel Erb in the "Cost Per Use Limitations" section. Given the limitations, this data does shed some light on what is being used.

This data is available for Duke Library staff only. Each link has a tab for usage by provider and usage by title.

E-Book Usage - FY 2023 - Tableau Dashboard

E-Journal Usage - FY 2023 - Tableau Dashboard


ILL Dashboard 7-1-2018 to 3-30-2023

https://tableau.oit.duke.edu/t/prod/views/DUL_ILL_Dashboard_20240530/DULInterlibraryLoanDataOverview

Neat Collection Analysis Projects at other libraries

Journal Reviews

NCSU - Collections Review tool to gather feedback from faculty about journal use

UMontreal - surveyed faculty and graduate students about top journal titles and used that information to negotiate big deals

Collection Assessment/Analysis Dashboards

Montana State University Library - using LibInsight from Springshare

MIT LIbraries Staff Web - using Tableaux

Cornell - Monograph Collections by Language, compared to WorldCat and IvyPlus holdings

LibGuides

Northwestern Libraries - About Collection Analysis