A Decision Support Prototype For The Kansas State University Libraries

In this work, we present a prototype of a decision support system, which has been built at Kansas State University, to assist the university library administration make informed decisions regarding the acquisition of books and the subscriptions and cancellations of serials. Keywords: library data warehousing, data mining, decision support systems 1 Introduction A data warehouse is a repository of integrated information from distributed, autonomous, and possibly heterogeneous, sources [3, 7]. The principal purpose of a data warehouse is to provide information to the management of an enterprise for strategic decision making. Users use front-end tools to interact with the data warehouse. Managed query, on line analytical processing (OLAP), and data mining are basic decision tools. Managed query tools shield end users from the complexities of SQL and database structures by providing subject-oriented views of a database and supporting point-and-click creation of SQL queries. OLAP tools pr..