Collection Analysis Reporting Tool for Management

CARTMan

Dan Scott, Heather Matheson, Holly Eggleston, Scott Nickerson

The Problem

• Collection analysis reports are required for internal and external program reviews on a regular basis
• These reports are very important, have relatively well-defined requirements, and tend to require tedious amounts of manual work to put together
• Common approach is to use LC call number ranges to identify items within a given subject discipline
• Some resources (e-journals) may not have LC call number ranges, so subject heading keywords would be a useful alternative
• As program reviews occur on a relatively infrequent basis, the call number / subject heading criteria are easily lost
  

The Dream

• Materialized views of normalized data to provide an ILS-independent source on which to generate reports:
• Holdings information
• Serials status
• Article abstracts and indexes
• Institutional repository content
• Ad hoc reporting based on facets of bibliographic records and holdings
• Default configuration includes discipline-specific criteria to identify resources in a consistent way
• Generates reports for each discipline on a regular basis, stored in a repository to provide historical snapshots of the state of the collection
• Codify the many "standard" collection analysis methods

The Hack

• Work backwards from an actual collection analysis report and generate the data for that particular report including WIBNIs that aren't satisfied by the current process
• Dump a set of raw MARC records, including local fields, from a subject institution
• Define analysis criteria for a single discipline: History
• Call number ranges
• Subject heading keywords
• Codify that criteria in an ini file:

The Algorithm

• Search record by record
• Does it match call number range?
  
• Yes - this is a primary resource; increment associated title from conf file
• No - Check for subject keyword match
• If match, this is a secondary resource; grab first term of first subject heading in bibliographic record and increment associated term
• Differentiate matches by type of resource:
• monograph, serial, database
• electronic or print resource
• Generate a simple list of primary and secondary resources with tallies for each category by resource type