Traces in the clickstream: Early work on a management information repository at the University of Pennsylvania
Year: 2003
Type: article
Abstract: For the past three years, the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) library has been building a data repository and developing computer functionality to support management information needs. This article traces the origin and evolution of Penn's evolving management information system (MIS) program, known as the data farm. It addresses problems pertaining to the collection, storage, anonymization, and normalization of data, and looks at current work on a database-driven model for future MIS functions. ********** In recent years, the range of academic library services powered by relational databases and servers has increased substantially. Our customers access electronic journals and search article indexes on the Web. They wand barcodes to charge-out books, use debit cards to copy or print documents, swipe ID badges to enter library buildings ... and the list goes on. These interactions with the library give rise to a flood of transaction data recorded by the databases and computers that drive service. The machines register when and where services are used and contain information about individuals and the resources people access. Occasionally they even capture clues about an individual's work environment; the traces of a cookie or a referring URL can provide such indicators; the location of a photocopier may offer others. The powerful tools of library service can support equally powerful tools of library assessment. In the right organizational culture, those assessment tools can inform and thus improve planning and decision-making. They can serve less benign purposes as well absent policies and procedures designed to safeguard identities Three years ago, motivated by the need to improve the measurement of electronic resource use, the Penn library began working with various kinds of transaction data, and in particular Web server logs, as sources of management information. Though narrowly defined in its early stage, this effort at log analysis is beginning to resemble the form and function of an MIS. The following is a brief survey of the embryonic MIS at the Penn library, an aggregation of data files and databases, form interfaces, and Web pages called the library data farm. Initial Challenges By 1998, the Penn library offered a large collection of online article indexes, full-text databases, and electronic journals through its Web site. As this quickly evolving, costly set of services expanded, frustrations mounted over the difficulty of measuring its use and impact. The lack of good management information, if only in the form of frequencies or other descriptive statistics, was viewed as a serious shortcoming, one that could hamper the library's accountability to the university's schools and impede planning and budgeting. For several years, the library staff has worked diligently to compile the few statistics that vendors provide and trace the spiral of Web activity based on Web-site visits and page counts. But these attempts at measurement have had obvious drawbacks. Vendor statistics have been meager, erratic, poorly defined, and incompatible across products. Web measures have provided information about machine load, but have revealed nothing about resource use. Together, the external and internal sources have contributed little clarity to the picture of digital information use. In addition, the compilation of these crudest of measures has proved too time consuming and labor intensive to carry out with any regularity. Given the absence of third-party solutions or working models, any approach to the management information problem would require a lot of experimentation with local data sources and systems. The approach would have to be independent of information providers and sufficiently robust to generate useful statistics with a modicum of labor. In short, it would have to provide a means of: 1. increasing the resolution of library statistics, especially with regard to demographics and cost analysis; 2. …
Author: Joe Zucca
Language: English
Subfield: Library and Information Sciences
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W339886523