Journal Collection Analysis: How We Developed New Tools to Improve Collection Assessment, Evaluation and Outreach

If you could create any collection management report, including any data, what would it look like? At Minnesota State University, Mankato, we’ve created a tool to provide journal collection analysis and evaluation (JCAE) reports which bring together a wide variety of data in one place. These reports can include Scimago journal evaluative data, any number of COUNTER JR1s, cost and payment data from the integrated library system or from vendor licenses, holdings data from the knowledgebase, subject data from indexes, Scimago, or the knowledgebase, journal data from Ulrich’s, custom data from academic departments, and more, as well as calculations based on combinations of these data. The tool is data-source agnostic. Really, there is no limit to the data we can include in our collection analysis reports. Thus, our question to ourselves – what do we want and why, now that we can do almost anything? We developed the collection analysis reporting system for several purposes, including full journal collection analysis, evaluation, and review, which we pursue biennially. We are most excited about the outreach opportunities to academic departments. We have formed a team including a development group to prepare reports, and a consultant. The consultant leads a service: (1) to help academic departments or programs realize the value of the collection, (2) to encourage collaboration with the library to improve student utilization of the collection, and (3) to inform library liaison decision-making. Our presentation will be split into two parts. In the first part, we’ll display several reports, including subject-level and collection-level reports. We’ll also provide a peek into how we create these reports. In the second part, we will talk about the JCAE service overall and what we have learned so far by providing these reports to our liaisons and to academic departments. We’ll display and discuss several graphs and figures we have adapted for different stakeholder groups. We’re especially excited to share some of the opportunities we see as we move forward. We will be migrating our JCAE tool to a new platform and version, so we also want to learn, what else should we be thinking about? What would you want in your own library to help you manage collections and to reach out to academic departments