Day: May 23, 2012

Lynne Grigsby and Susan Edwards conceived (as part of the Library Service Model re-envisioning look at access) of a set of reports that show
* how many items are in circulation at the moment of snapshot
* what libraries checked out these items
* whether the items are checked out to faculty, graduate students or undergrads
* what academic department a faculty or student borrower is affiliated with. (Note: this is determined by the campus address for faculty, and declared major for graduate and undergraduate students).

Every other month, Dave Rez in Systems will run  3 reports (items in circulation, at the moment of snapshot, to faculty, grads, undergrads) and post them to  http://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/annual_statistics/circ_snapshots/ .  Pilot reports were run for faculty and grad students based on a day in March; these reports were then refined for the May run and include undergrad information. A link to these reports has been included in /CS on the Budget/Metrics page.

I’ve already found these statistics to be fascinating: we now have a metric to help quantify our anecdotal understanding that “research is highly interdisciplinary” and that “each of our libraries services users from a myriad of academic departments.” It will be very interesting to see if the patterns in March/May continue as we are looking at longer stretches of time.

Gail is working with the May statistics and we’ll release some findings in the next month or so. From here on, any of you will be able to access and consider this data for your libraries.

Thanks to Susan and Lynne for this great idea, and to Dave Rez for making this happen!

–Bernie