Crushing, Blending, and Stretching Data: Data Warehousing and Mining Data from Voyager and Other Library and University Systems for Assessment of Library Operations

Abstract

Ray Schwartz, Systems Specialist Librarian, William Paterson University.

The topic is the Cheng Library’s effort to build a system that brings together transactional data from a variety of library systems and services for purposes of management, evaluation and assessment. A long term goal is to assess use of the library’s materials, electronic resources, catalog, interlibrary loan, web pages, and so on by patron demographics (such as status and department/major) and influence budgetary decisions based on the outcomes. The talk will present the project’s concepts, implementation stages, data analyses/reports and their impact on the management of library operations. An actual example is linking the data from proxy server transaction logs (database accesses and ILL requests) with the Voyager circulation transactions and patron tables. The audience will see how to combine transactional data and user demographics from various physically separate sources and how it can enhance the ability to monitor, evaluate, assess, and manage! the impact of library services.