Director's Station for Usage Stats

When it comes to defending a library's budget, the numbers speak for themselves. Now, with the release of Director's Station 4.8.1, SirsiDynix is putting the power of statistical reporting right into the hands of library directors and administrators, allowing them to extract usage data easily regarding any number of relevant criteria like circulation and fines.

Dubbed “business intelligence for libraries,” Director's Station runs all of the powerful functionality of database table queries through an easy-to-use graphical interface layer. The AJAX front end provides drag-and-drop access to item-level statistics based on multiple criteria for any range of dates. This includes plenty of fiscal year time frames, as well as filters relating to activity, checkins, and historical checkouts.

“Something that's really unique is the ability to drill down to specific title information and tiny data subsets,” Shirrl Beeson, technical product manager for SirsiDynix, told LJ. She added that Director's Station provides access to far more data granularity than can be easily extracted from the ILS itself.

There are more than 100 existing installations of previous versions of the software, with beta testers for the new version at Los Angeles County and the University of Oklahoma libraries. And though SirsiDynix reps have indicated that larger consortia and county and state libraries have found the software useful in breaking statistics down by region, city, or installation, the product is being positioned as a tool for staff at libraries of any size interested in sorting out the trends these kinds of statistics can provide. Director's Station works with Symphony 3.2 and 3.2.1, as well as Unicorn GL 3.1.

Also of interest to members of consortia that participate in shared borrowing plans is the just-released 4.1 version of SirsiDynix's Universal Resource Sharing Application (URSA). With many of the same goals as ArticleReach designed by Innovative Interfaces (see InfoTech, LJ 10/15/08, p. 22), the software is touted as a means to streamline the labor-intensive interlibrary loan (ILL) request and fulfillment process.

SirsiDynix claims that the new version of URSA “quadruples the speed in which patrons receive their requests” and cuts the costs of traditional interlibrary loan by as much as two-thirds through automating as much of the process as possible. The software can also be run via Software as a Service (SaaS, a popular option for SirsiDynix ILS customers, said the company) and provides an improved interface for addressing loan requests.