Holistic tools for use and usage data

Center for Jewish History

Written by CenterForJewish…on Tue, 02/09/2016 – 10:53

The library services department at the Center for Jewish History is collecting a variety of use and user data, including search terms and user behavior information from our single-search layer, ExLibris’s Primo; usage statistics from our digital asset management system, currently ExLibris’s Digitool and soon to be ExLibris’s Rosetta; Google Analytics web traffic data from all of its public-facing servers; and collection usage data from its materials management software, Atlas System’s Aeon.  However, we do not have a way to holistically analyze this trove of data, and therefore we are not able to take action or make informed decisions based on data. In discussion with our colleagues at other institutions, it’s clear that we are far from the only ones who use such a combination of systems that meet our needs. A Metro fellow with experience in data analysis could develop a method of holistically analyzing the variety of information we collect, implemented via documentation, workflows, scripts, software, or some combination thereof. Such tools and processes would be of great value to the Center and also be broadly applicable to other special collections libraries.