Reporting on ROI
Scrooge McDuck property of Disney, fair use
From "The Care of Books", John Willis Clark, 1901, Cambridge University Press; reproduced from sculpture at a Roman camp
No epiphanies but maybe a few tricks.
Please interrupt.
ROI is about total return.
- Users
- Holds
- Circulations
- Assets
- Activity
- Events
- Money
Assets (Collection)
One of the first things that people think of when they think of a library's budget and is a significant expense to obtain and manage.
Raw Circulation
Report prime.
Variety of cost estimates out there. I like Newark Public Library's
http://www.npl.org/Pages/AboutLibrary/calculator/estimates.html
Non-Cataloged
Non-Cat Circ
Non-Cat In House Use
Making Use of Cost Estimates
Evergreen stores cost of item in three places: bib, item and a default org unit.
You can make use of values in reports but to make best use of this feature for things like receipts you may want to fill in item level costs by circ mod or shelving location.
Swiss Army Librarian, 2012
http://www.swissarmylibrarian.net/2012/05/08/highlighting-the-value-of-library-use/
Higher Value Circs
Identify school support, job searching and similar categories to high light their use by stat cat, 650s, shelving location or circ mod.
Non Circulation Item Value
Reference and Special Collections are Inventory Assets (well, all are)
In House Use
Circulation & Users
Basic stats are core to most libraries but
become far more powerful once combined with other data.
External Data
SAIPE - Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates by State, County and School District (US CENSUS)
Factfinder.census.gov - Population by county and metro areas, ages, ethnic groups, etc...
Block Level Mapping - https://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/geocoder.html or commercial services
For individual level data external commercial services.
How to Use
Method 1. Create Evergreen Reports and map in the values manually using spreadsheets such as Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets.
Method 2. Use custom tables in the database and optionally map into Evergreen as a new data source.
Example:
Evergreen Circulation Data
+
Evergreen Patron Data
+
US Census School District Poverty
+
US Census Address Geocoding
| School District | Poverty Level | Circulations | Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| 001 | 15% | 3,456 | $345,034 |
| 002 | 9% | 1,230 | $20,223 |
| 003 | 5% | 900 | $18,000 |
| 005 | 11% | 650 | $5,782 |
| 007 | 8% | 8 | $600 |
What else? Add age. Add ethnicity from data. Add school graduation rates. Break down by type of material.
Activity
Schema: actor
Table: usr_activity
usr
event
e_type
ewho | ewhat | ehow | label
-------------+--------+---------------+--------------------------------
| login | opensrf | Login via opensrf
| login | remoteauth | Login via remoteauth
| login | sip2 | SIP2 Proxy Login
| login | apache | Login via Apache module
opac | login | gateway-v1 | OPAC Login (jspac)
staffclient | login | gateway-v1 | Staff Client Login
selfcheck | login | translator-v1 | Self-Check Proxy Login
ums | login | xmlrpc | Unique Mgt Login
authproxy | login | apache | Apache Auth Proxy Login
libraryelf | login | xmlrpc | LibraryElf Login
selfcheck | verify | translator-v1 | Self-Check User Verification
ezproxy | verify | remoteauth | EZProxy Verification
Pros and Cons - easy to check, easy to connect to Evergreen activity, does not show actual checkouts*
You can always load external vendor reports as data sources of course....
* 2.12 & Overdrive
Events
How many emails did you send?
Text messages?
Emails?
These are all effort from the library, communication done just like Facebook posts. We take it for granted but it's reportable.
Money
Fines paid are standard for most libraries.
Fines not paid?
Fines forgiven?
Fines past a certain date?
This is a very sensitive category but can be tied to other data, such as fines forgiven in poverty areas.
Surveys
Surveys can gather valuable opt-in data points that can be made into statistical categories.
Questions?
Reporting on ROI
By Rogan Hamby
