The Assessment Team supports the management and assessment of print and electronic collections for Emory Libraries. The support is primarily provided through the management, analysis, and visualization of collections data. This page describes and provides access to related tools, methods, and resources. For more information contact Doug Slaughter.
Approval and Firm Order Dashboards: The approval and firm order dashboards are Tableau visualizations built from Emory Libraries metadata. These metadata are derived from our approval plan and firm order selections respectively. Data are pulled from Gobi, cleaned, and fed into a dashboard that allows users to assess the performance of publishers, subjects, and call number ranges in terms of cost and usage over time. This tool would be useful for subject librarians and informationists seeking to analyze usage within their areas.
The tutorials below were created to orient selectors to the approval plan dashboard. The longer video covers what you can expect to find in each of the views, how to subset the data to allow for more targeted review, and important considerations and caveats about the dataset. The shorter videos contain useful shortcuts covered within the longer video, but without the additional context and explanation. They are meant to be used as a quick reference, not substitutes. Some of the navigational tips in the shorter videos might also be helpful in navigating other dashboards built with Tableau.
LibStats (i.e., EZ Proxy Data): The LibStats dashboard was built by Lisa Hamlett in LTDS and uses anonymized metadata on 'actions' of Emory users. The data do not identify users down to the individual level. However, EZ proxy data may indicate for instance that: a "Masters-level" student opened a file or downloaded the table of contents for a particular title within an e-journal or collection. This is a useful supplement when looking at collection usage among university stakeholders because it gives greater insight into which groups (e.g., faculty, seniors, first-year grad students, etc.) within the Emory community are using the collection.
There are two important limitations in using this tool:
Unsub: Unsub is a tool designed to aid libraries in the process of unbundling large publisher deals. They've built software that takes pricing information, open access data, Counter data and backfile information to illustrate potential savings from unbundling. Emory Libraries maintains access to this resource for use by collection managers and other relevant stakeholders.
We have used this tool for several years and have found it useful overall. However, this is not ideal for looking at usage data longitudinally, which is an important consideration given that titles often need multiple years to see adequate usage and a single year is usually to narrow a scope for proper assessment. You may view a demo of Unsub here.
Project COUNTER: Project COUNTER is a collaboration among the member library community, publishers, and vendors centered around establishing a Code of Practice for e-resource usage statistics. This non-profit is responsible for updating COUNTER standards and assisting vendors in becoming COUNTER-compliant.
COUNTER data are integral to our approach to collection assessment because the standard allows us to compare usage across vendors, over time, and with peer universities in a consistent and reliable manner. We also use the COUNTER metrics for part of our annual reporting to the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) and the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS).