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Working with historic circulation data the other day I discovered that affiliates of the Washington Research Library Consortium borrowed some 20,653 monograph titles from Mason’s libraries during FY 2012-13.  Thinking about Mason’s collections and those of fellow WRLC members, I assumed that the strength of our STEM collections would surely push those sorts of titles to the top of any “what gets borrowed sorted by LC classification” list…

Did that happen?

Not exactly.   Here’s an excerpt of the list that aggregates the number of titles borrowed by each book’s LC classification number.

To explain,  the first entry shows we circulated 1,067 titles with the  LC classification stem of PN (e.g.,  PN 4748.G7 C48 1997).

LC classifications with a circulation of at least 100 titles:

The top ten subject classifications account for 8,311 titles or just a fraction over 35% of the all circulation to WRLC members.    The first STEM subject appears in position # 7 (the QA’s) and not again until #24 on the list  (Medicine – Internal Medicine).   Totaling the titles for all STEM classifications shown in this list covers 1980 titles  (or about 8% of all titles circulated).   I can think of a couple of alternative explanations for this phenomenon:

• STEM research, for the most part, doesn’t seem to involve books, or
• WRLC member libraries have very strong STEM collections and don’t need to borrow books from Mason

A colleague pointed out yet another possibility:  my 100 circulation threshold may be suppressing the count for STEM titles–given that those areas tend to have more finely-grained LC classifications.

And finally, my friend Dorothea Salo (@LibSkrat) pointed out that “need it now” might be the reason STEM borrowers don’t request titles from other libraries:

More research needed to nail down that last one down.

[update 3/28/2014]  Today my colleague Theresa Calcagno pointed out another factor that I haven’t thought about–it might be that e-books in STEM subjects are suppressing the number of circulations for those subject areas. 

I reworked my SQL and ran a variation of the query to get numbers on titles borrowed by Mason-affiliated borrowers during the same period: broken out as before by each title’s LC classification.   This dataset included 66,733 distinct titles (the WRLC dataset had 20,653 titles).    As an aside, some 6,357 titles were common to both datasets.

Here’s the result for any class with 450+ circulations:

QA (computer books for the most part) jumped up to #2 on this chart but otherwise, the STEM titles just don’t seem to circulate like those in the Social Sciences and Humanities (next best showing for a STEM discipline was TK at #19).  I’m ready to say I have an answer for what I’ll call the  “Salo postulate”

I’m now wondering what, if anything, the similarities and differences in these two lists can tell me about collection strengths and weaknesses at Mason and WRLC libraries.

Last week we logged the 1,036,791th search on our Primo system. I think I’m most impressed by the nearly vertical line between the start of this semester (August 24) and early October.

I’m building an SQL database to help with assessment of library services.   Today’s autodidactic activity involved counting the number of students by status (undergrad, grad or law) based on the declared home address in the registrar’s database.

Finally nailed the SQL syntax but as I looked more closely at the results, excitement waned…

I suppose there are other ways to mangle Washington, DC during data entry.  Maybe if I were to just count DC in the “state” field–surely that would be a reasonable proxy for living in the District, right?

Ordinarily, yes, but that student from Bangalore, India, DC still leaves us with an off-by-one error.

Seems librarians are more interested in assessment today than was the case just a few years ago.  There are many reasons for the quickening of interest but I suspect most cluster around one or the other of these themes:

• – a sense that libraries need to justify their existence, relevance, etc.
• – everybody’s talking about data so you need to have some to be seen as serious

In this sort of environment, the prudent course is to prepare for a dramatic rise in “Can we get some numbers on this?” questions. If you haven’t heard them yet they’re surely coming.

One way to get ready is to build in ways to measure new services as you develop them. Another is to look at data you already have and see if it can be enhanced to deliver a more compelling usage metric.

For my library, one option worth investigating–and the only place where I know I can capture every bit (and byte) of what’s happening with e-resources for off-campus users–is our EZproxy server. Is there a new way to look at the activity logs on that system? Let’s see…

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We placed an search widget on our library’s home page once Primo went “live”–pretty standard fare for libraries that implement a discovery product.   Our search widget looks like this:

You’ll notice we’ve put a lot of explanatory text (which, of course, no one reads) and a number of options.  That little “locally-held collections” box was added so a user could limit search results to just our Voyager catalog and our DSpace and LUNA systems–reducing the noise that enters a result set when you include in the Primo Central Index content.

Thanks to some logging this widget performs, we know that since January 8, 2013, it has been used to launch 104,186 searches.  For 4,180 of them, the “Limit to locally-held collections” box was also checked.

Which means our usage stats show that our little “limit” checkbox gets ignored 96% of the time.   Should be easy to make the case that we should just remove it, but still…

• it is used in 4% of searches
• it likely performs a useful function for the 4% that select it
• it imposes no real penalty if you choose to ignore it

I understand why some lean toward a search box that offers no options and very little explanation–just enter something and see what you get.   I also appreciate the fact that you can offer a user so many choices and options that all you’ve really done is increase the odds that they’ll choose the wrong thing.

What I haven’t quite figured out is when is it right to toss a useful feature that you know only a small percentage of people use.