Across the UK, data is driving decision-making in libraries, helping managers work out what their users are doing and then cleverly updating their day to day experience without the users even noticing. JISC Inform spoke to Ben Showers about how libraries can take a leaf out of Amazon’s book and turn user interaction data into action.

Libraries spend millions of pounds on electronic journals each year, but gathering statistics about their use hasn’t always been easy. Previously, collecting usage data about a library’s resources involved visits to multiple publisher websites and numerous spreadsheets. The collection of statistics took up the majority of the librarian’s time, with little leftover for acting on that intelligence.

Fortunately a number of JISC projects have helped change this situation dramatically. What’s more you can now analyse log files to bring you usage statistics for any e-resource, not just journals. The Journal Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP) provides a one-stop shop for libraries to view, download and analyse their journal usage reports from publishers.

“What once took days is now out of the way in an hour,” says Ben Showers, programme manager in the digital infrastructure team at JISC, who is managing innovation work in this area.“More importantly,” he says, “universities and colleges are using this data to generate those all-important comparative usage statistics which help evaluate the impact of e-resources and can therefore inform future purchasing decisions.“

The next step for librarians who have got their activity data in order is to ensure that they tap into what’s going on across the country, to make even better use of that data. Interested librarians can get involved with their commercial suppliers user group where libraries come together and work on the data themselves, improve it and upload it back to the suppliers' knowledge base. JISC’s initiatives like discovery and KB+ are harnessing that community activity.

“Back office systems impact on front facing services,” says Showers. “There’s a flow there, the two can’t be thought of as separate anymore. Back office efficiency makes the libraries' decisions smarter, better, more efficient, but that has a knock on for the user and makes the collections that the library has even more tailored to the user.”

What most students want to know, Showers argues, is ‘what is the strongest student in my class reading? What is my tutor recommending?’ As the systems and services libraries provide get better at utilising and exploiting the data they generate, students will begin to be offered answers to these kinds of questions, transforming the experience of interacting with the library. Already, there are examples of initiatives that are changing the experience of using the library for students.

The University of Huddersfield has, for example, made using the library into a game: students earn points for entering and using the library, and can then compare themselves to their friends and fellow students. The Lemon Tree project is encouraging more students to use the library and raising its profile – and it works through making the administrative data visible to students in a way they can interact with. Showers explains, “They’ve taken something that doesn’t have much value in itself – the student activity data – and they’ve turned it into an experience for the student. That, I think points to the future for libraries.”

Showers says, “Amazon has turned user interaction data into a science of engagement – every time you visit the site it gets better, but you’re not even aware that you’re interacting with it at that level. That’s the kind of experience we hope students and staff will be able to enjoy from their academic libraries in the future.”

For the moment concerns about who owns the data are keeping these kinds of experiments on a local level – but libraries can still learn from these examples, argues Showers.

The first thing to do, he says, is to do an audit of your library activity data: what you have, where it’s coming from and how comparable it is. Showers says: “Diminishing budgets must demonstrate value for money, so gleaning reliable data is already at the top of the to-do list for most librarians.” JISC has produced a guide to using activity data which can help you assess not only how well your resources are used but also provide you with business intelligence on many other aspects of your institution’s activity to help you make better decisions.

Showers says, “I used to talk about reduction of effort in the library for back office systems. But it’s increasingly about redistribution of effort; redeploying it to the front end.” He recommends developing an entrepreneurial spirit among your staff. You can take advantage of events like mashed library get-togethers, Dev8D and Dev8Lib which are all about enabling that kind of innovation.

“It shouldn’t really matter if it’s the library or a student who’s developing a mobile app to search library content. Ideally universities and colleges will be in a position to exploit ideas, wherever innovation happens to flourish on the campus – this is what I mean by an entrepreneurial spirit. It’s an often repeated cliché, but someone else will think of the most amazing things to do with your data – if you allow them to. This is how companies like Twitter and Facebook become so successful; through enabling that innovation to emerge outside of the company’s walls. In an academic context one might imagine researchers developing tools and applications based on library catalogue data that support very niche use cases, but nevertheless help make those researchers' work more effective and efficient.”

All of this begs the question: what could students, libraries and even externals come up with if they were allowed to access library data?

Showers argues that there needs to be a change of mindset to help this happen. He says, “We still think in terms of the library developing services for the user. In the future what we’ll find more and more is that the user starts developing services for the library – and then the library has to ensure that it has the skills and capacity to take those on board and work with them. JISC is already helping libraries to develop a more agile, ‘start-up’ approach by supporting events like Dev8D and funding projects that support this innovation.”