Cover Story

C4D Project

Features

SBII Update

SUNYLA Conference 2011

New SUNYConnect Logo

Focus on SUNY and SUNY Libraries

SUNYConnect Updates

Notable Announcements

Linkable Links

The SUNY Business Intelligence Initiative (SBII) is a SUNY-wide effort to provide data analysis and reporting tools for a wide range of university information. SBII is using the Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) software tools. The library aspect of the SBII project is to provide for a SUNY-wide collection analysis reporting tool in support of program review and resource sharing. A Proof of Concept (POC) phase that included bibliographic and circulation data from a subset of SUNY campuses was developed. A report on the POC can be found in the October 2009 issue of SUNYergy.

What’s New
As of 2011, the SBII Library Project now includes bibliographic and circulation data from the 55 campuses on the Aleph shared servers hosted by the Information Technology Exchange Center (ITEC). This includes 8,213,547 bibliographic records found in local library collections as of December 2010 and circulation data from 2006 through 2010. A significant and welcome change is that authentication with local campus logons is now in place to provide easy access to the SBII Library Dashboards from each campus. Logon examples are illustrated in the "Orientation to SBII Library Dashboards" document.

Types of Information Available
The SBII Library Project includes Dashboards for Collection Analysis and Circulation Analysis. The goal of the project is to provide for SUNY-wide review rather than a campus-specific reporting tool. Basic instructions for using the SBII Library Dashboards and information on the data elements utilized from each of the Aleph catalogs are available. The site also includes video overviews showing the use of the system.

Here are some examples of the type of information the SBII Library Dashboards can provide:

Using the Collection Analysis Dashboard, let’s look at the titles held by the Technology Colleges in the subject division Engineering & Technology. This display enables viewing of categories within that division (via the "select an attribute" drop-down menu). The category Electrical Engineering has the largest title count.

Use the Uniqueness tab to identify which titles within the Electrical Engineering category are unique or held by more than one Technology College.

A Title Details Report provides title level information by campus. Results can be downloaded into a variety of formats including Excel for further manipulation. Links are provided to the SUNYCatalog for more complete bibliographic and holdings information. Here is an example of titles held in the category Electrical Engineering by six of the Technology campuses (obtained by clicking on the "60" entry seen on the previous screen).

Information at the bottom of each results display provides details on any filters that might have been selected, for instance:

Continuing with the theme of Electrical Engineering titles held by the Technology Colleges, a review of the Circulation Analysis Dashboard illustrates the amount of circulation by publication year range.

Clicking on a specific circulation count under a particular year for a designated publication year range will provide a Title Detail Report that lists the titles that circulated during that period.

Important concepts to be aware of
The following issues are important to keep in mind because the absence and/or accuracy of the data in the records pulled from each campus will effect whether campus titles are included in particular results lists. The SBII Library Dashboards results are, of course, dependent on the inclusion and accuracy of data pulled from the local campus Aleph databases.

• OCLC numbers are used to determine uniqueness/overlap across the campuses;
• Class level information (LC, Dewey, NLM) from the MARC bibliographic record is mapped to Subject Divisions and Categories for subject analysis (the OCLC Conspectus was used for this analysis);
• Publication information was taken from the MARC fixed field in the local campus Aleph bibliographic records;
• The accuracy of values representing attributes such as language, format, type of reproduction is dependent on local campus input.

Efforts are underway to include additional SUNY data (from the university centers) into the system. OLIS encourages you to explore the SBII Library Dashboards and share your questions and comments through Footprints. Please be sure to visit the SBII Library Portal for more detailed information.