Director’s Station: Holy Grail or Pandora’s Box?Leona Jennings

2010 COSA User Conference, Gold Coast26-27 October 2010

The City

• 510,671 residents

• 70 km beaches

• 260 km navigable waterways

• 287 days sunshine

• 2,245 parksImage courtesy of Gold Coast infohttp://www.goldcoastinfo.net

Gold Coast City Libraries

promoting learning, inspiring imaginations

Director’s Station - some background

• GCCC implemented:– Unicorn in 2003

– Director’s Station in 2005

• Migrated to SaaS in 2009, in the process upgrading from– Unicorn 2003.1.4.5 to Symphony 3.2.1

– Director’s Station 3.8 to Director’s Station 4.8.1

• In 2010 we upgraded to:– Symphony 3.3.1

– Director’s Station 4.9

Statistics are somewhat like old medical journals, or like revolvers in newly opened mining districts. Most

men rarely use them, and find it troublesome to preserve them so as to have them easy of access; but

when they do want them, they want them badly.

John Shaw Billings

"Billings, John Shaw" The Oxford Dictionary of Scientific Quotations. Ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter. Oxford University Press, 2006. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Gold Coast City Council Library Service. 22 October 2010 <http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t218.e134>

Who uses it?

• Management– for marketing, reporting, planning,

benchmarking, evaluation

• Collection services staff– for collection development,

budgeting, database cleanup

• Branch librarians– for business planning, morale, QA,

rostering, targeted services

• Library staff– for collection management,

program evaluation

Image courtesy of the Gold Coast City Council Local Studies Library.

My toy!

Collection management

Canterbury Christchurch UniversityUploaded by Travelin’ Librarianwww.flickr.com

Loans

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.

Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Beaconsfield

"Disraeli, Benjamin, Lord Beaconsfield" The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Ed. Susan Ratcliffe. Oxford University Press, 2006. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Gold Coast City Council Library Service. 22 October 2010 <http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t91.e755>

Data validity – tips for the unwary

• Symphony vs Director’s Station– Single point of truth

– Real time vs batch update

– Composite measures

– Terminology

• “Current” vs “Transactional” data– Only checkins, historical checkouts and renewals, and OPAC

searches are created from the Symphony activity logs

– The other cubes are built directly from the data tables within Symphony.

…When she was good / She was very, very good, / But when she was bad she was horrid

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Henry Wadsworth Longfellow" Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. by Elizabeth Knowles. Oxford University Press Inc. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Gold Coast City Council Library Service. 22 October 2010 <http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t115.e2066>

The good

• Flexibility• The ability to drill further and further down, to have multiple

dimensions, to look at the same data from various angles• Instant gratification• You can’t hurt anything and you’re not at risk of bringing your

production LMS to it’s knees• The underlying lists you can produce from most cubes• It’s easy to use and generally fast.• Easy to export data to Excel etc.

The frustrations

• Reports and dimensions can be slow to open the first time, and may even time out until cached on the server.

• There are never enough dimensions – there is always something else you need.

• The lists often exclude that one extra field you need.• Need to know your data structure to know how to use it

effectively.• When there is an issue it takes a while to fix.

In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the

prisoners of envy

Ivan Illich

"Illich, Ivan" The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations. Ed. Elizabeth Knowles. Oxford University Press, 2008. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Gold Coast City Council Library Service. 22 October 2010 <http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t93.e897>