Maximising use of library resources

Sue White and Graham Stone, from the University of Huddersfield, were presenting a two phase project (although they emphasised that it's still a work in progress)

• Phase 1: Looking at low/no use users
• Phase 2: Linking use to student attainment, looking for evidence of impact and value, connected to the University Teaching and Learning Strategy

They identified three main indicators of use:

• Access to e-resources, via log-ins to MetaLib (as they can see who users are, which isn't trackable in other usage statistics)
• Book loans, through Horizon LMS circulation statistics
• Access to library, through gate entry statistics at the main campus library which identifies students via their ID cards

The results were sobering: figures for zero use are high, even in Schools perceived as 'good' library users.

They then matched usage data with the student record system (SITS) in order to get complete data for two cohorts of students on 3 year courses. More statistical analysis of data is needed but it suggests a clear correlation between MetaLib logins and books borrowed, and degree classification, across all Schools. There was no correlation with gate entry figures, however, which may be been due to complicating factors like an extensive refurbishment programme and the location of other student services within library building.

The project team have done more detailed analysis of 15 'low use' courses, focused on 3 year undergraduate courses delivered on main campus, and excluding courses with less than 35 students (to avoid the possibility of identifying individuals).

The results still suggest a consistent link between e-resource use, book borrowing and student attainment, across all disciplines. There are outliers, like students who have obtained firsts but didn't appear to be library users, and some courses don't follow the pattern eg where degree classification is influenced by book borrowing but not e-resource use. This raises some interesting questions: are e-resources not relevant to the course? is the tutor not advising them to use e-resources? have they bought the right e-resources? do users know about them? are students using Google to go straight to the e-resources, bypassing MetaLib?

This kind of project does raise some issues so Huddersfield's advice was:

• Politically sensitive topic to investigate, beware offending tutors
• Important to have support from senior management of university
• Identify academic 'champions'
• Need to acknowledge subject differences: there may be pedagogic reasons why some courses do not use resources the way a library might like
• Not cause and effect relationship: not a case of 'borrow more books and get a better degree'
• Be honest about findings eg university spent a lot of money on refurbishing the library but gate counts don't correlate with attainment

Hudderfield's academic librarians now have a mandate to go out to the Schools, to explore reasons for non/low usage on specific courses and develop an action plan. The action plans will cover:

• course profiling
• raising tutor/student awareness with targeted promotion
• reviewing the induction process
• embedded information skills training at point of need
• targeting resource allocation (both information resources and staffing)

They will produce an Annual Resource Statement each year with Schools, laying out what % budget will be spent on books, journals etc, a list of resources to be cancelled/renewed/started each year. Progress will then be reviewed annually.

More information is available via the University's repository

[This session was also a useful complement to the discussion about metrics and return on investment raised by Carol Tenopir in the second plenary session on "Economics of Scholarly Information", which focused more on the library's impact on research and in particular grant income]

Plenary 1: Technology and Change, Richard Wallis

“Libraries have always been at the leading edge of technology” says Richard Wallis, Technology Evangelist from Talis, as he shows us some photos of very early OPAC systems, many times removed from the modern day library website. To further illustrate the changes of the past several decades he shows us a calculator from the 1970s, whose £39.95 price is the equivalent of £400 today, but whose functionality is now a free app on almost any electronic device you care to name.

The information industry is all about helping people to find things and linking students to the resources that they need. We need to rethink how we do this, bringing the information directly to the user, in the format that they want. There should be no need to bounce the user via resolvers and multiple URLs to a site that eventually proclaims “Here it is!”. It should just be delivered.

Getting users to the answers they need can be done via search (searching the OPAC or more likely Googling) but answers can also be computed (WolframAlpha) or navigated to. All of these methods rely on metadata. Librarians and metadata, Wallis points out, go back a long way, but there’s still a way to go. Library metadata for the most part is “built on principles that worked for physical stuff” and is more often than not only available from the library. This metadata can be made more useful.

And so to Linked Data, which, put simply, identifies things, links to those things and describes those things. The four principles of Linked Data are

1. Use URIs as names for things
2. Use HTTP URIs so people can look them up
3. When someone looks up a URI provide useful info about the thing, in the right format (for human or machine consumption)
4. Provide links to the URIs of other things to aid navigation.
   

To show some examples of Linked Data Wallis bravely attempts - and pulls off - a web demo. He shows us education.data.gov.uk, a semantic store of data about UK schools, and BBC Wildlife, which pulls in its descriptions of animals from Wikipedia.

What about libraries? Some are experimenting in Linked Data - the Library of Congress, National Library of Sweden, for example, so we’re seeing the start of library linking hubs. But we need to go further. Library linking hubs should link to non-library hubs (government data, the internet movie database, many other resources) and the library catalogue should become a set of links between concepts, become part of the Linked Data web.

The drivers for this evolution are not likely to be local cataloguers. Metadata for e-resources needs to be good and needs to delivered with the resource. Article level metadata can’t be catalogued, there’s just too much. But it is being aggregated (by CrossRef, for example). As this metadata gets better we’ll start to see non-library hubs linking to library data.

In summary, technology is evolving extremely quickly, and consumers are driving delivery methods - “get it to me on my device”. Education needs to link students to resources and search is only one way of doing this. Linked Data is powering the web but mostly outside of libraries, and libraries and publishers need to catch up.

“You can add great value to the web, but you need to be proactively of the web to do it. They won’t come just because you build it.”

See the slides here.

Your ideas, please!

While the conference and its myriad of blog postings is fresh in everyone's memory, we'd like to ask for your input on a related subject.

The UKSG publishes an Open Access e-book called "The E-Resource Management Handbook", which is intended to be an evolving source of comprehensive support for information community practitioners. The Handbook has been well-reviewed and currently covers subjects such as:

• usage statistics
• licensing
• archiving
• content discovery

New chapters are commissioned on a regular basis to address emerging issues - we are seeking to ensure that it remains current and relevant to readers with different regional and professional perspectives. So we invite you to contribute suggestions for new chapters. For example:

• Could you identify discrete aspects of your profession (whether that is librarianship, publishing, marketing, technology, information management...) to which you, or your colleagues and peers, could use a practical guide?
• Have you recently sought information about a topic only to find the current literature is inadequate, out-of-date or irrelevant to your particular needs?
• Is there an area in which you have expertise from which you think the wider community could benefit?
• Are you aware of emerging technologies, new product categories, evolving business functions or changing supply chain processes that need to be documented?
  
• Would you say there are developments outside of our core community (e.g. political, economic, social, technical, legal, environmental) which nonetheless have an impact on our activities and could usefully be assessed within our context?

Please let us know your suggestions, either by commenting on this posting or by emailing marketing@uksg.org. Our thanks, in advance, for helping us to keep the handbook topical and current as the landscape of scholarly communication continues to evolve.