collection analysis
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Collections Committee Main page
The purpose of this page is to brainstorm strategies by which to conduct an analysis of the BHL Collection
Final document on recording questions we want to ask of the BHL collection for a Collections Analysis project
Google doc
DLF Forum 2013 presentation
DLF presentation description and link to session notes
Brainstorming and notes for preparing proposal and presentation:
google doc
Special thanks to Connie Rinaldo, Trish Rose-Sandler, William Ulate and Bianca Crowley for getting this all together and extra super special thanks to Connie for presenting this on behalf of the Collections Committee!
Questions
What do we want to know as a result of doing this collections analysis?]]
- What kinds of gaps are there in the BHL collection?
- Do significant gaps exist for certain geographic areas?
- Do gaps exist for certain subject disciplines?
What kinds of questions would you want to ask of the BHL collection?
- For all the subject terms in our collection's scope (see our collection's scope terms here), how many titles match with these terms? How many are BHL member titles vs. BHL non-member titles? Want to see terms with the title counts for each term
- What are the top 500 subject terms in our collection (from word cloud)? Break down by BHL member titles vs. BHL non-member titles? Want to see terms with the title counts for each term
- What are the geographic subject headings for BHL titles? What are the geographic subject headings for non BHL member titles? Want to see terms with the title counts for each term ==> We can infer: What geographic regions are (not) well represented?
- For all titles that have X as a subject, what other subjects are associated with these titles? Can we get a count of these additional subjects ie -- For the 1983 titles with Agriculture as a subject heading…what other subject terms are associated with these titles and how often do the terms occur?
Collections Analysis workshop delivered at
DLF November 2013
Strategies
1. Subject & call no. analysis
2. Discipline specific analysis e.g. Cornell entomology collections
3. Subject bibliographies
- Use subject bibliographies to perform analysis --> need a "bibliography of bibliographies" - Mendeley?
- Librarians as subject specialists for accurate bibliographies
- Focus on monographs?
- Some Bibliography examples: Index Animalium, TL2, BPH
- Take 1-2 Botany bibliographies from Don's List
BHL collections core terms and bibliographies 2012-1.docx
by Jackie Chapman and Robin Everly
4. Rod Page’s list of high impact taxa titles (itaxon currently down)
5. Anecdotal observations
- JW reports that OCLC analysis tool did not seem to reflect her collection, sometimes anecdotal evidence is best
- Maybe there is a way we can ask experts in the field what they think about the BHL collection
- What questions could we ask of them? ==> maybe some sort of a questionnaire
- Do the "BHL and our Users" blog posts have any anecdotes on the BHL collection?
6. Analyze Gemini scan requests
- Turns out Mike L. keeps data submitted to webform (yay!), i.e. this data is not coming from Gemini but from the webform itself
- Scan request data: ScanningRequests.xls
- Doesn't actually provide much data for analysis about what's missing from collection as bib metadata, esp. OCLC nos., provided by users are not always reliable
- Good source of content for permissions scanning however
7. ILL analysis
- What are the most requested public domain biodiversity materials?
- What are the most requested post 1922 biodiversity materials?
- How can you tell what ILL items are biodiversity relevant?
- Cal Academy (Becky)
- Field (Christine)
- SIL (Martin)
- MCZ (Joe)
8. EOL
9. PDF Download analysis
Need to ask Mike L. (Bianca)
10. Google Analytics
- What are the top titles searched for in BHL?
- What are the top scientific names searched for in BHL?
- Can user demographics tell us anything about BHL collection strengths and weaknesses?
11. OCLC Analysis
