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From ARL Profiles to Questions for the

ARL Supplementary Statistics?

ARL Survey Coordinators and SPEC Liaisons MeetingWashington, DC

June 25, 2010

Martha Kyrillidou, Ann Snowman, Patrick Reakes, Bob FoxAssociation of Research Libraries

Background

• Task Force on New Ways for Measuring Collections

http://www.arl.org/stats/aboutstats/tfnewways.shtml

• Quantitative and Qualitative (counting and sensing)

• Two seminal reports:• Some Alternative Quantitative Library Activity Descriptions / Statistics that

Supplement the ARL Logarithmic Index by Bruce Thompson• Research Libraries as Knowledge Producers: A Shifting Context for Policy and

Funding by Yvonna Lincoln

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• Action agenda – Feb 2007

• Implementation plan:

Collect qualitative data to develop a profile of ARL member libraries

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ARL New Ways of Measuring Collections

An Action Agenda Adopted February 2007

• ARL Board of Directors

• ARL Task Force on New Ways of Measuring Collections

• ARL Statistics and Assessment Committee

ARL New Ways of Measuring Collections

1. Reserve use of the current membership criteria index for those occasions when it is needed for consideration of membership issues.

ARL New Ways of Measuring Collections

2. Implement an expenditure-focused index.

ARL New Ways of Measuring Collections

3. Use the new expenditure-focused index for any public reports, such as in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

ARL New Ways of Measuring Collections

4. Begin to develop a services-based index that combines the following three factors: collections, services, and collaborative relationships.

ARL New Ways of Measuring Collections

5. Revise definitions for collections-related data categories currently collected and experiment with a variety of new measures, including usage data, strength of collections, and service quality measures to develop a richer set of variables for potential inclusion in the three-factor alternative index (see above).

ARL New Ways of Measuring Collections

6. Collect qualitative data to develop a profile of ARL member libraries.

Preliminary report

• ARL Statistics and Assessment committee, April 2010:

http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/agenda_april_2010.pdf

Mixed methods: Can we integrate the qualitative with the quantitative? How well? For what purposes?

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Profiles

• Pilot among committee members (Fall 2008)• Data collection among ARL membership• From the perspective of the directors of ARL libraries..??• 86 profiles collected (Fall 2008-Spring 2010) … • Coding & Analysis of 84 profiles (Bill Potter, Colleen

Cook, Martha Kyrillidou, Jennifer Rutner, Michael Maciel and David Green; consultant Nick Woolf)

• RLLF project to translate the profiles into questions for the annual surveys (Bob Fox, Patrick Joseph Reakes, Brian Skib, Ann Snowman)

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Report Highlights – Public vs Private

• Collections of national distinction 30% versus 64%

• External funding 37 % versus 59%

• Budget 47% versus 27%

Report HighlightsARL Investment Index – top quintile versus bottom quintile

• external funding 75% versus 19%

• description of university 100% versus 56%

• information commons 88% versus 56%

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RLLF project

Research Library Leadership Fellows project

Engaging them to validate the analysis

Develop profiles for their libraries

Looking at peer institution profiles

Identifying key themes that are important

Translating themes into questions

Future ARL Supplementary Statistics?www.arl.org

Potential themes

• Development/Fund Raising/Grantsmanship -  activities/staffing/successes

• Digital publishing (i.e. OJS)

• E-science/Data curation and management

• Collaborations across all levels and on/off campus

• Scholarly communication (open access/author rights, etc.)

• Assessment activities (i.e. data portals, data driven decisions)

• Space utilization ( innovative renovations/uses, gate counts, etc)

• Use of social networking tools/mobile applications

• Staffing changes (i.e. new or reworked positions, new job titles, degree requirements)

•

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Potential themes (con’t)

• Collaborative collection building/development

• Warehousing/remote storage (shared/individual, on/offsite, active use/dark archive, etc.)

• Instruction activities - current statistics include actual classroom instruction but do not capture efforts preparing materials for asynchronous instruction or the use of those materials (web guides, podcasts, etc.)

• Digitization efforts beyond or more specific than those already collected in the Supplementary Statistics (IRs, created and converted digital collections, etc.)

• Horizons - an open-ended question requesting feedback from each institution annually on areas of emerging interest - new services, trends, services/resources you no longer provide, etc.

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Our challenge …

A question has come up about ARL counting standards for e-books, and I

> wondered if a discussion about this issue would fit into your agenda

> for the Friday meeting at ALA. The specific question concerned Google

> Books that are digitized and in the public domain...about a million

> books meeting this definition are hosted by Hathi Trust, and

> bibliographic records are available. If an institution were to import

> copies of these records in their own online catalog, with links

> pointing to the digital full text hosted by HathiTrust, would these

> 'count' as part of the library collection? Any discussion about how

> others are counting e-book collections would be very useful. Some

> services such as Ebrary provide thousands of e-book records to be

> imported into a catalog for patron-initiated purchase--we don't

> actually own the book until it is purchased, but technically we are

> providing access to the full text from each of those thousands of

> records. Do these records count since we are providing 'access' to the

> text? …. Carole Pilkinton

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