I have just completed the Libraries’ submission of annual statistics to Temple University’s Office of Institutional Research & Assessment. I’ve been doing this kind of work for years, and it still pains me. This in spite of tremendous support from colleagues.
Why is it challenging? Well, this year we were in the midst of migrating data from Millennium to Alma at the end of the fiscal year (June 30, 2017). Mark Darby had to get his statistics in quickly (volume and title count, number of e-books). Extracting collections expenditures data is not too difficult, but Temple’s multiple fiscal close dates means that we may not have final numbers until months after the actual end of the fiscal year. I count on the expertise of Christine Jones and Brian Schoolar for that.
Reference and instruction statistics are pulled from multiple sources: department annual reports, LibAnalytics, various Google sheets. From the outside it seems inefficient (and it is), but Special Collections Research Center, Research & Instruction, Blockson, Digital Scholarship Center, Ginsburg, Public Programs – they all have somewhat different needs for documenting what they do. So we accommodate that and standardize the numbers as best we can.
I use Google Analytics for statistics related to use of the the library’s web site and digital collections. This is relatively straightforward, except that digital collections are spread out over several domains. These need to be aggregated.
Counts of the number of staff members seems a straightforward metric, but we need to decide on who should be counted as a “professional” and who not. Archivists, information technology staff, editors? The library has many, many roles that our outside traditional MLS-degreed librarians. And each library counts it differently. ARL (Association of Research Libraries) has us count professionals. ACRL (Association of College and Research Libraries) has us separate professionals into two groups: librarians and non-librarians. The definition of a librarian reads, Staff members doing work that requires professional education (the master’s degree or its equivalent) in the theoretical and scientific aspects of librarianship. That’s kind of vague!
Circulation of physical materials should be straightforward, but ARL is only interested in books and media – no reserves, no computers. Our coding systems don’t always make it easy for us to pull those kinds of materials out of the reports. Study keys – those numbers are important to us locally, but not to ARL or ACRL.
The electronic resources statistics. This is a huge effort, mainly on the part of Darina Skuba and Karen Kohn – who go to each vendor site to pull statistics on e-book usage, article downloads and database searches. Then we combine two sets of files (The Counter standard is based on calendar year but we report for the fiscal year), to determine a total number.
Finally, I rely on Royce Sargent (HSL) and Carla Wale (Law), to provide me with the same sets of numbers for Health Sciences and Law.
Why do we do all of this? Several reasons: ARL and ACRL provide useful metrics for benchmarking our activity and institutional support compared to our peers. The numbers can provide important information about trends in academic libraries – what’s going up (e-resource usage, collections expenditures) what’s going down (circulation of physical materials, reference). Finally, the University relies on these numbers as they contribute to rankings, ultimately attracting the best faculty and students (and alumni support) to Temple. So I endure the pain and promise myself it will get easier next year.