Below the Surface

Three years ago Gen Smith, automation program supervisor at Yuma County Library, AZ, analyzed the collection’s average publication dates. Her analysis, based on 2000 individual reports, took a month to complete. In 2005, Smith ran the same analysis with SirsiDynix’s Director’s Station for an update. “Within half an hour, I had the exact same information that had taken me a month to get,” she says.

Over 500 SirsiDynix libraries now use Director’s Station. “It moves libraries into a class where corporations and for-profit businesses have been for a long time: being able to look at their data and what it’s doing and what to do about it,” says Smith.

Library software vendors, realizing ILS products can reveal business intelligence, have begun to offer tools like Director’s Station to help library managers get more out of their data, and librarians are taking advantage of the benefits.

Less digging, better decisions

Across the state at the Phoenix Public Library (PPL), the staff use a CARL ILS and, since January 2003, CARL’s measurement program, CARL.Decision. Before CARL.Decision, programmers, not librarians, developed reports. “You could not manipulate the data,” says Ross McLachlan, library services administrator of technical services. “But in this environment, we can take data sets from one report and combine them with sets in another report to produce yet a third report. We can manipulate the data in any way we wish.”

CARL.Decision isn’t open-ended in its search functions. “If we had the ability to designate every piece of possible data, we could draw up the reports in a much easier fashion,” says McLachlan. And librarians have to combine individual reports manually.

Both CARL.Decision and Director’s Station employ interactive menus, allowing librarians to build reports by picking options, such as date range, item type, branch location, or acquisitions history. “You can ask it a question, such as, 'What day had the highest circulation last week?’” says Smith. “When you’re planning how you’re going to arrange your staff, you want to know what’s your busiest day.” The results can be exported into a readable report, complete with graphs.

However, librarians can’t create new search parameters in Director’s Station. For example, Smith couldn’t find how many times patrons searched for a certain title. But she’s yet to be disappointed in the program. “I haven’t come across anything yet where I’d stopped and said, 'I wish it would do this,’” she says.

Greg Hathorn, vice president for library products at SirsiDynix, says title search is coming and emphasizes the possible combinations of the tool’s available search parameters. “When you consider that a library will have dozens and dozens of different types of items, as well as all the user profiles, then the combinations for all of the data—well, when you do the math, it’s well up into the trillions,” he says.

A more collegial datascape

Hathorn wanted to create an easy-to-use measuring device with broad appeal. “I didn’t want to build a tool that was for IT alone,” he says. “I wanted to build it for the director, the managers. That’s kind of nirvana: everybody starts thinking about this as a manager.”

McLachlan describes CARL.Decision in similar terms. PPL has a reports team that encourages open exploration. Its members post all CARL.Decision reports on the staff intranet, so any staffer can both view and manipulate them. “It allows the systems staff to take a step back from reports and allows the public services staff to generate them,” says Paul Hancock, PPL’s library enterprise systems manager. “Then the public services staff has a better idea of exactly what they need.”

One example is the weekly ratio report. Three holds on an item generate an automatic ratio report and prompt a purchasing decision. But the books aren’t always obvious. “More often, it’s a local history, or even some fairly obscure technical book, or a fiction title that catches everybody by surprise,” says McLachlan. “We’ve found that many times, we’re ahead of the curve—we recognized a book’s popularity early and have already placed orders for it.”

Phoenix’s reports are good PR as well. For an upcoming bond vote, the city relied on library statistics drawn from CARL.Decision. And the city manager releases a monthly newsletter with the latest city stats, including some from the library. “Last year, the reports team analyzed how the materials budget had been allocated over previous years and compared it to the circulation records,” says McLachlan. “And wherever we put our money, that’s what circulated. It validated that we had made very good decisions in divvying up the budget.”

Off the beaten path

Without a structured tool to dig into their ILS, some librarians have to get creative. Mark Dahl, assistant director for systems and access services at Lewis & Clark College’s Watzek Library in Portland, OR, goes beyond data mining. He sets up web applications to browse Lewis & Clark’s journal and AV holdings with data from Innovative’s ILS. “Innovative has an interface that lets you create lists of records in the system and then export the data out from those lists,” says Dahl. “Once it’s out, it’s pretty much up to you to put it into another database and put it on the web.”

Elizabeth Thomsen, member services manager at the North of Boston Library Exchange (NOBLE), is also an advocate of flexibility in extracting data from the Innovative ILS. “We want our vendor to provide us with tools that allow us to access our data, but once we have it, we’re very happy to export it to Access, Excel, or other external systems,” says Thomsen.

“One of the major strengths of the Innovative system is the provision of some very general-purpose tools that can be used in creative ways to accomplish a host of different tasks, many of which were probably never even imagined by Innovative,” agrees Richard Jackson, head of copy cataloging and database manager at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, CA.

Jackson relied on data mining for a space-analysis project, merging an art collection filled with oversized books into the main collection. “This involved extracting the data from a large number of records, using UNIX regular expressions to filter out the dirty data, and getting it into Excel, which I then used to produce a table and chart that helped in planning the shelving for the integrated collection,” he explains.

As Dahl points out, Innovative does offer products, such as the XML server, to make data mining easier, but a small college like Lewis & Clark can’t always afford extras. So, the librarians become the extras. “We’ve got a group called the systems team, with representation from acquisitions and a couple of reference librarians,” says Dahl. A reference librarian wanted to export data into RefWorks, a tool for building bibliographies. “We were able to create a little export script that was kind of a hack, to get the data out of the system. Now we’ve got reference statistics showing it’s being used a few hundred times a month. For a small school, that’s pretty good.”

New skills required

Innovative gathers knowledgeable ILS users like Dahl’s systems team into a supportive community. NOBLE’s Thomsen explains, “The Innovative model of success does place an unusually strong emphasis on the interaction among users at Innovative Users Group and regional conferences, our email group, our clearinghouse of resources, etc.”

Librarians benefit, too, Jackson adds. “Innovative benefits from a superb user group,” he says. “Especially through user-group conferences, many library leaders do become better aware of what their system can do.”

Jackson sees a role for tools like CARL.Decision and Director’s Station in bringing crucial players closer to the data. “Innovative does provide a great deal of flexibility, but the tools it provides for data extraction and analysis are probably more likely to be used by systems librarians, database managers, department heads and other librarians, rather than administrators,” he admits. Good use of Innovative’s ILS, he says, requires partnership between those who want data and those who know how to get at it.

Thomsen is not convinced that a tool alone can make up for the skills a capable library manager must develop. “They’re the ones who are allocating space, staff, money, and other resources, all of which is based at least in part on an analysis of data,” she says. Library directors may not be aware of every field in an ILS record, Thomsen says, “but putting a powerful front-end on reports doesn’t help with that problem.”

Thomsen encourages NOBLE managers to understand the kinds of information that the ILS can deliver (see “Speaking the Language of Data,” below) to inform decision-making. For example, folks at one of Thomsen’s libraries wondered whether to open on Sundays, so they reviewed Sunday transactional data to discover how many of their own patrons were straying to nearby libraries to get Sunday access. NOBLE librarians also analyze self-service indicators like renewals, holds, and password use. The results have prompted some libraries to market home access to patrons.

NOBLE librarians also review catalog-search statistics. “But the really interesting data is in the searches themselves,” says Thomsen. It’s possible to see search terms tried and track their failure or success. “It’s really like an ongoing, automatic version of usability testing,” she adds, explaining how this data improves training, help prompts, and catalog design.

The next step: data planning

Both Thomsen and Jackson warn that you can’t mine what’s not there and stress the importance of data planning. “I’m somewhat bemused by the term data mining, because it metaphorically implies that all efforts are made in the extraction aspect, rather than in data organization, sort of like pulling diamonds out of a mountain,” says Jackson. “Some of the problems that data mining needs to solve would be almost trivial if the data had been given some structure in the first place.”

But you have to begin where you are. Tools like Director’s Station and CARL.Decision can lower the bar to data use in decision-making. Experts like Dahl, Thomsen, and Jackson can increase that same awareness, closing the gap between the questions library leaders have and the answers the ILS can provide. When more librarians can dig into ILS data with their own hands, data planning will supplant data mining in our priorities for making smarter, evidence-based decisions.