Best Practices in Peer Reports

Thursday, Oct. 28, 2004

Bowling Green State UniversityChristen Cardina

The University of Akron

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Goals of Presentation

• Show how to create Peer Group

• Explain how to run Peer Reports Show examples for use in collection

evaluation for improved collection development

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How to Determine a “Peer Group”

• Your college or university may belong to a consortium, i.e. 5 Colleges of Ohio

• Subject Area combined with academic level, i.e. universities that offer Ph.D. in Nursing, or colleges/universities that offer Biomedical engineering programs.

• Your “Peer Group” may be made up of true “Peers,” or it could be made up of libraries with collections that you aspire to emulate, those known to be the best in a given subject area.

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Building a Peer Group

• From the GOBI Home Page

• Go to Options and then Edit Peer Group

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Type of Library: I

chose “Health

Sciences” and

clicked the filter

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Peer Group

• University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

• University of Pittsburgh Health Sciences Library

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Two Types of Peer Reports

• Peer Comparison: • Identify specific titles to order • Generate ideas for refining

your approval profiles• You can explore not only what

other libraries are getting, but how they are getting it, i.e. slips, approval plan, continuations, or firm orders

• Only one library can be compared with your library at a time

• Peer Ranking:• Generate graphs showing the

distribution of titles acquired by each library in your peer group

• Gives a quick view of the buying patterns within a subject area

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Ways to Use Peer Reports

• Good source of bibliographic information related to title choices made by your peers- strengthens Collection Building in established collections, or when developing a new collection for a new curriculum

• Justify Budgets by documenting what peers are spending in a given subject area for a given time frame

• Accreditation- can compare my collection with the collections of schools accredited in a given curriculum.

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Peer Reporting Tools are located in the “Library” menu under “Peer Reports”

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1. Peer Ranking

• Generate graphs showing the distribution of titles acquired by each library in your peer group

• Gives a quick view of the buying patterns within a subject area

• Click the “Rank” tab to go to the Peer Ranking Screen

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This report is meant to give a quick overview of the buying patterns of each library. It tells me that we all ordered about the same number

of titles last FY, UA: 141; Pitt.: 135; UNC: 123.

Report can take about 3 min. to run as it searches for the acquisition history of each of the libraries.

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Click View/Saved Searchto review your report parameters. Saving the

report allows you to run it again without reconstructing the search parameters

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Click “Retrieve

Search” to run saved searches

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2. Peer Comparison Report

• Identify specific titles to order

• Generate ideas for refining your approval profiles

• Only one library can be compared with your library at a time

• Click “Compare” tab

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Running a Peer Comparison Report between UA and Pitt for Subject “Nursing”

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83 of 135 titles

purchased by Pitt

were not bought by

UA (2/3rd’s)

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2nd Peer Comparison between UA

and UNC

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66 out of 123 titles bought by UNC were not bought

by UA. (1/2)

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It’s interesting to note HOW titles were purchased

Another Example

Different Subject

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Biomedical Engineering

• Last FY, this fund had very little money and no approval plan. This year, funding greatly increased. I wanted to see what other Biomedical Bibliographers were doing with their collections.

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Biomedical Engineering Peer Ranking Report

• Did not use “Peer Group,” which was built for Nursing.

• Selected Wright State and U. of Cincinnati which have Biomedical Engineering programs.

• Used LC Ranges which are designated to the Biomedical Engineering fund code at U. of Akron: (note there is no “Interdisciplinary Subject Descriptor” for Biomedical Engineering)

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Separate by semi-

colons

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Results: U. Cin: 40;

Wright State: 22;UA: 11

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Peer Comparison

Report between UA

and U Cincinnati

Subject: Biomedical Engineering

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34 of their titles were not bought

by UA

We’ve Reviewed

• How to Create a Peer Group

• How to do a Peer Ranking Report– Generate graphs showing the distribution of

titles acquired by each library in your peer group

• How to do a Peer Comparison Report– Identify specific titles to order

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Take some hands on time to create your own reports

Questions?

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