Making the Most of Your Data: Embedding Business Intelligence into Daily Operations

Increasingly under pressure to demonstrate their value in relation to the objectives of the institution or consortium, libraries are looking for ever more creative ways to improve efficiency and productivity and expand their services. Powerful analytic capabilities enable libraries to put numbers on their value and to expose tangible evidence of their leading role in the academic lifecycle. From usage data and onwards, analytics shed light on the inner workings of the entire institution, as well as those of the library. Valuable insight into libraries’ operation can be gained via purchasing trends, comparative analysis, and even predictive analysis—helping managers to better plan their daily operation. During this session, we will review Virginia Commonwealth University’s strategy to leverage library data and integrate it seamlessly into day-today workflows. Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries has been adopting a number of analytic strategies to demonstrate value, measure success, and inform decisions. This includes three primary initiatives: dashboarding of key metrics; analytics of user interfaces; and adoption of Alma, Ex Libris’ nextgeneration library services framework. Dashboarding initiatives have been two-fold: staff and public. For staff, we have consolidated access to key statistics onto core webpages. This simple project of collecting statistical access points reveals the wide variety of data and sources. From gate counts to service desk transactions to individual system statistics, it is both an impressive and overwhelming array of data from at least 14 disparate sources. In addition, we also compile and archive yearly statistics for ASERL, AAHSL, IPEDS, and local university requirements. Other libraries have pursued more in-depth staff dashboarding and/or datamarts by consolidating external data into a central source. 1 Such libraries include Notre Dame, Brown, and NYU Health Sciences Libraries. See Morton-Owens, E., & Hanson, K. L. (2012). Trends at a Glance: Management Dashboard of Library Statistics. Information Technology and Libraries, for a recent discussion of NYU Health Sciences’ Libraries’ management data dashboard. We have also been discussing a dashboard of key library measures to be made available on our website for our various constituents including students, faculty, donors, and university administrators. While we have not yet released this, the planning and prototypes have focused our thinking and raised a number of questions. First, how many and what measures are truly meaningful to our public? Should there be different views for different audiences? How much value is there in having the data available in real time? In selecting a specific measure, are we willing to publish potentially negative trends? Our test dashboard is winnowed down to annual statistics for 12 measures in the three categories of Collections, Collection Use, and Library Use. Data is not dynamic but compiled into Google Spreadsheets and then displayed to the web through JavaScript, CSS, and Google Chart APIs. The proposed architecture would certainly not be scalable without staffing to populate the underlying spreadsheets. It is, however,