2017 Charleston Library Conference

Today, most academic libraries are spending a significant amount of their total expenditure budget on electronic resources. While they are high-value assets for modern libraries, the expensive annual subscription cost and continuing price increases of e-resources also make them a substantial budgeting burden. It is therefore essential to have a clear statistical view of the trends and patterns in price changes for e-resources and vendors. This presentation will focus on three major topics vital for developing such a view: 1st, the e-resources landscape and the need for evidence-based decision-making, analysis and reporting; 2nd, the methodology applied in a statistical analysis and data visualization research project, as well as business trends and patterns in the field of libraries’ e-resources; and 3rd, business intelligence tools available for this type of analysis, including low cost options such as Excel and Redlink, and premium options such as Tableau and MicroStrategy.
Research conducted by librarians from different SUNY institutions based on cost statistics extracted from the ILS provided a thorough and in-depth review of the price changing trends of common e-resources for academic libraries from 2010 to 2015, as well as a prediction for future price changes through 2018. This research analyzed the percentage, average and median increases of e-resources titles by vendors; compared prices and usages of selected resources; visualized these data into charts; and provided predictions for future price changes, which were evaluated by their correlation to existing expenditure statistics.
To conduct such in-depth analysis of electronic resources and to provide internal colleagues with a way to view and glean insights from this type of analysis requires the appropriate tools. Virginia Tech University Libraries conducted a comparison of Business Intelligence (BI) tools available for this type of analysis and will discuss various BI tools, including low cost options such as Excel and Redlink, and premium options such as Tableau and MicroStrategy. We will share our evaluation of each of these BI services based on ease-of-use, data analytics, visualization, dissemination, and service support. In addition to discussing the pros and cons of each tool, we will demonstrate how each tool displays visualizations and dashboards.