Good morning and welcome to January's Alma Primo VE open office hours.
This rescheduled session is going to cover iShare annual statistics package find the right report.
This is a
session we like to do around this time of year because we know you all are looking to answer annual reports for IACRL, IPEDS, and other reporting agencies.
So we are going to get underway with that topic very shortly.
We do have an announcement to go out to members that we want you to
take note of and then we'll have the presentation and then follow that with open questions and answers on today's session or any other topic that you might have interest in.
First, our announcement of the day is that the premium sandbox refresh is coming up in February.
This happens twice a year, February and August.
The refresh happens on Sunday, February 11th as part of the quarterly release update.
Varied under the lead here is that the Alma quarterly release actually happens on Sunday, February 4th with new features being added to Alma.
In fact, the next Alma office hours coming up
two weeks from today will be a review of the new features that are coming forth in that release.
But back to the premium sandboxes refresh, if you are an institution that is using the sandboxes for training or practice or developing some new tools or workflows,
When the sandboxes get refreshed, all of the settings are reverted back to the state of an institution that they are copied from as of the date that the copy is made.
At that point, Carly staff have to do some resetting of user accounts to make sure that you can log in again and do what you were doing.
And then anything that you were doing, you will have to start from scratch or rebuild them.
So if you are doing anything in the premium sandboxes, make sure you copy what you're doing, save your work and document how to recreate your testing scenarios so that you can start over without having to start all the way back from square
For more information on the sandboxes, see our sandboxes page, which Adrian just linked into chat.
With that, let's go ahead and move into today's topic, the iShare annual statistics package, finding the right report.
If you've been around Carly for a while, you might be aware that we typically share a lot of information about these reports when they are generated in July of each year.
However, we typically receive support requests for these data throughout the year as institutions have many reporting obligations with different requirements and deadlines.
Whether you may be answering IPEDS or ACRL, replying to the ILLINET Interlibrary Loan Survey, or just providing data on your collection to your institutional research department, these reports provide statistical snapshots of your institution's iShare data.
A quick look at our goals for today's presentation.
We're starting with some background on the stats package in general.
Then we'll begin to highlight the reports that might best answer your pressing survey needs.
We'll also cover how to retrieve your reports when they're generated and talk about how you can learn more about each report in the package.
The reports in the iShare statistics package have grown over the history of iShare as a platform.
In fact, many of the report definitions are historically rooted in the questions that used to be asked by survey agencies, as well as the ways in which previous iShare platforms recorded data.
Since coming on to Alma, we've been focusing on learning to leverage the analytics system to make our data comparisons to the past are reasonable.
That is making apples to apples comparisons.
But we also are making sure that data are accurate and identifying the sources of those discrepancies.
Later on, we'll talk about ways that we might update our package.
And we add in questions and answers.
But it is an ongoing development that we do.
And you'll see what we have available for you right now.
Collectively, CARLI staff work on 29 reports in total.
Some reports are generated and distributed automatically by scripts, while other reports are generated and compiled by hand.
As noted, these reports are typically created each July in conjunction with CARLI's new fiscal year.
If your institution has a different fiscal calendar, we work to time report creation and delivery to those dates.
Most of these reports are shared directly to members by the secure FTP server, which is files.carly.illinois.edu.
And in fact, many of those same reports have versions that get generated monthly as well.
A separate set of reports, which tend to be consortium-level analyses and comparisons, are posted exclusively to the CARLI website.
Along with the reports that are distributed in Excel or text formats, we provide as many of the definitions as possible in the Carly Networks folder of Alma Analytics.
Now with a look into circulation and automated fulfillment reports, here's Debbie.
Thank you so much for that introduction, Ted.
Let's take a look now at the circulation and the automated fulfillment reports that we have available as part of the annual statistics package.
As mentioned, descriptions of these reports along with tips for how they can be used to fill out your ILLINET, IPEDS, ACRL reports are available on the CARLI website.
I've divided the way that we'll talk about the circulation and automated fulfillment reports into two parts.
So for the reports that are named here on the screen,
This is the first part.
I'll be talking about the CERC and AFN reports that are delivered to each iShare Library's FTP directory.
We'll discuss a little bit later in our presentation today the way that those reports are delivered to the FTP and how you can retrieve those.
And we'll provide more information to you about where on the CARLI website you can find more information about these reports, including the file names that those reports have, the fields that are found in them,
and the caveats that we know about the data.
So the first part will be the reports delivered to your FTP.
Then for the second part, I'll switch to talking about consortial reports that are posted to the CARLI website.
In the CARLI FTP directory, you'll find reports both named for circulation and reports named for the iShare Automated Fulfillment Network or the AFN.
The circulation named reports tend to be ones that you could potentially run in Alma Analytics
at your own institution if you did want the data at a different time frame than the annual stats reports that CARLI uploads to your FTP.
If you would like any more information about this, please feel free to send an email to CARLI support.
For the reports that are labeled for being for the AFN, those need to be run by CARLI staff as we have to run them at the network level to look for information across all Alma IDs.
So we'll talk about the five circulation reports.
We'll look at the three AFN reports on the screen for part one.
All of these CERC reports slice and dice the data up in different ways.
These different ways allow you to look at the data, depending on what your specific institution needs to know.
All of the iShare libraries are structured a little bit differently.
You all divide your items and your patrons up in slightly different ways.
And so what you may really like out of CERC STAT 3 might be something else that someone really likes out of CERC STAT 1.
And so which report works best for your institution will depend on your institution structure.
It seems like overall, CERC STAT 3 is the one that we hear gets used the most in reports as far as I know in the Carly office.
You'll also notice there is no number for CERC STAT 5.
That's not currently included in the statistics package, as we have not yet modified it for running in Alma.
So let's go through looking at some of these screenshots.
Next slide, please.
You'll notice that most of the sample screenshots are from the former Lincoln College.
So just to mention here at the beginning, the numbers for your own institution, as well as the values found in the field, that will vary.
Your institution will, of course, have different data.
The columns will be the same for you, but just remember with what you're seeing on screen, the data in the columns will be customized for your own institution.
So CERC Stat 1, the one that you're seeing here,
This is looking at circulation by item location at time of loan.
This report is useful for identifying the busiest parts of your collection.
If your institution has your locations divided up in a way that materials of the same material type are in the same location, so for example, you have a media location that contains DVDs and you have a graphic novels location that contains graphic novels, this report
can then also give you insight onto the material type of those items that are used as well.
If you have mixed material type shelving locations, we have some institutions where Mainstax has inter-filed DVDs and books on the same topic.
You will know less about the item type from this report, but you'll know about the popularity of a shelving location overall.
Next slide, please.
CERCSTAT2 is circulation by circulation desk.
So, if your institution only has one circulation desk, this report may not be as helpful for you as it'll just give you overall totals and numbers.
But if you did have multiple branches or if you have multiple circulation desks within your library, this report can help you to gauge how busy those circulation desks or branch libraries may be.
Next slide, please.
CERC Stat 3 is looking at the user group and the home library.
We use this report here in the Carly office quite often because the borrowing institution column, column C, it lets us know whether a loan for your institution's item was for a patron from your institution or a patron from another iShare library.
In the screenshot on the slide, you will notice the first several rows were from patrons from another iShare library.
We can see also that in addition to having the iShare institution's name in column C, the patron group column in column D confirms that by listing the iShare user group.
That is the user group that when patrons from one institution borrow material from another iShare institution, their user account is associated with that linked user group of iShare.
And then alphabetical order will come into play for where your own institution's loans to your own patrons show in this report.
If your institution is alphabetically closer to the alphabet, to the beginning of the alphabet, your own local records will be towards the top of the report.
If your institution is alphabetically towards the end of the alphabet, your own loans will be at the end of the report.
So alphabetical order will matter for you.
But in this screenshot,
for Lincoln College, rows 18 through 24 are the loans to Lincoln College's own patrons.
That patron group column allows you to see which local user group completed the loan and renewal transactions.
So for example, students completed 144 loans for the year in this screenshot.
So this report can be helpful for seeing the use of your library by your local patrons, as well as seeing which iShare
library patrons borrow materials from your institution.
Next slide, please.
CERC Stat 4 looks at kind of a different direction than the previous reports in that it's thinking about serial title circulation and in-house use counts.
So we're switching to the circulation of serials.
Your institution may or may not actually have any results in this report when you look in it in the FTP directory.
That depends on whether your materials have the bibliographic record type of serial, whether those serials actually have barcodes in the item records, and whether you scan those barcodes for loaning them to patrons or for recording in-house use counts.
This screenshot is from Carbondale because I know that some of their serial items do have barcodes and that they sometimes do get scanned as part of staff workflows.
You might be able to get serial loan information from CERC STAT 1 also.
That, remember, was the report on item location at time of loan.
That is if your serials are barcoded and they are in their own shelving location.
So if you do circulate serials, like print journals and magazines, CERC STAT 1 might have information for you.
CERC STAT 4 might have information for you.
We will skip over CERC STAT 5, which is not yet ready for ALMA.
And the next screenshot, please, is CERC STAT 6, which will let you know circulation by user group and item policy.
So CERC STAT 3 gave us home library and user group.
CERC STAT 6 includes user group information as well.
So in ALMA, some institutions are moving away from depending on
the item policy to determine the way that their materials circulate.
Some institutions are relying more on location for those circulation policies.
With that, some institutions are also then adjusting their cataloging practices to deprioritize the item policy item type that are in the records as well.
So if that deprioritization of item policy
describes your institution, this report will not be as useful for you as it otherwise might have been.
If you're not putting item policies into records, whether on purpose or some have just been missed, you'll notice there are some rows in the report that will say item policy of none.
So for us in this screenshot, we can see some examples in rows 21 through 23.
So if you're noticing that more and more
rows in this report have that item policy of none.
You are wanting to use that information.
This may not be the report for you anymore.
You may want to then start focusing on those location-based reports.
All right.
So we're going to switch now from looking at the circulation reports that are uploaded to your CARLYs FTP directory, and we'll look at the AFN reports that are uploaded there.
So these reports pull data from across all of the iShare libraries, and so CARLI staff must run these reports in the network zone.
You would not be able to run the AFN reports yourself.
AFN stat one, which you can see here on the screen, is the network lending counts.
This outgoing ILL, it represents the items loaned by your library to each other iShare library.
An on-site lending transaction is one where the patron of the other library walked into your library to check the item out.
A remote lending transaction is one where the patron from the other iShare library placed a request for the item.
You then packed it up, sent it through delivery to the patron's desired pickup location, and the charge transaction happened there.
So here is a
snapshot of Lincoln College's data, we can see which institution was the borrower in that column D and also whether that, which institution the patron was a borrower from, sorry, and then whether that loan happened on-site or off-site.
So it happened at Lincoln College or at another iShare library.
Next slide, please.
AFN 2 is the borrowing that your patrons have done.
Again, we've got a column for lending institution and then account for the loans that occurred for those other iShare libraries who lent us materials.
Incoming ILL represents the items borrowed by your patrons from other iShare libraries.
This is account of the loans that were completed.
An on-site borrowing transaction is one where your patron visited the other library and did the loan on-site.
A remote borrowing transaction or an off-site is one where your patron requested the item, it was sent to your library, and it was charged at your library.
Both AFN Stat 1 and Stat 2 have totals listed on the CARLI website, and we will look at a screenshot of that in a moment.
Next slide, please.
For AFN Stat 3, this is the next report that you will find in your Carly FTP directory.
This is a list of the titles that were borrowed by your patrons from other iShare libraries.
So this report is a title list.
And from what I've heard, it's often used by libraries for collection development.
This report lists the titles your patrons checked out from other libraries.
It is not looking at what they requested and received or requested and did not receive.
This is just looking at loans that were completed.
But you can take a look through this.
There are more columns beyond column I to provide more information about those titles.
All right.
So now we will look at screenshots of the consortial level statistics that are posted on the CARLI website.
So next slide, please.
The links to those pages are listed here, so you could click on them later, but also later in the presentation, we'll have more information about where you can navigate to find these on the CARLI website.
Next slide, please.
So for AFN Stat 1,
We already looked at how you can see your library's full data, which lets you know more information about the individual institutions that you interact with.
But here publicly on the CARLI website, we've summarized the totals for those lending accounts at all iShare libraries.
So with this, you can do some peer-to-peer comparison, and you can get a good sense of the overall volume of transactions that are happening in the consortium.
Next slide, please.
AFN Stat 2 is the borrowing count, that incoming ILL.
Incoming ILL represents the items borrowed by your patrons from other iShare libraries.
Again, this is completed loan transactions.
Your library's version of this report in the FTP gives you the detailed information about your institution.
This website version, again, is just totals.
Next slide, please.
AFN Stat 4 is an annual report that allows you to review the counts of your local patrons' requests for iShare library materials.
This is a report that you will find yourself using to help you fill out the ILLINET Interlibrary Loan and Reciprocal Borrowing Survey, and also the IPEDS and the ACRL surveys.
We do have a webpage on the CARLI website for tips for using these reports to fill out surveys from external agencies,
And AFN Stat 4 here will help you with questions 2.3 and 2.4 of the ILLINET survey, and you can review that webpage for more information about other ways this report might be used.
This one lets you see, again, the counts of your patrons' requests for other iShare Library's materials.
Okay, next slide, please.
AFN Stat 5 is the annual report posted to the CARLI website that allows you to review the count of other iShare Libraries patrons' requests for your institution's materials.
So patrons from other iShare Libraries asking to borrow your institution's things.
Similarly, this report also helps you answer the ILLINET iPads and ACRL surveys.
For the ILLINET survey, it helps you to answer question 3.3 and 3.4 for FY23.
All right.
Next slide, please.
We're going to take a look now at a few additional snapshot reports that you might find helpful.
So this here on the screen is the library patron record count for FY2023.
This includes, now this snapshot includes patrons across all local patron groups, even those that are used in library use or library workflow accounts.
This is a snapshot of active unexpired users as of July 11th of 2023.
If you need to know more specific details about these patron counts, including excluding
library use accounts, let us know and we can help you work on a report in the CARLI office.
We may not be able to get that information historically, but we can help you set something up for the future.
Okay, next screen.
We also have borrowing and lending comparison.
So this just pulls into one view the total numbers from AFN Staff 1 compared to AFN Staff 2.
so that you can take a look to see if your institution tends to be a net lender, a net borrower.
You can also compare peer-to-peer institutions if you are asked to do that for some reporting purposes.
So that's pretty much the purpose of this report is to make that summary easier.
The information is also available on the AFN 1 and 2 pages.
Next slide, please.
The circulation transaction comparison
is also doing some summarizing for you.
It's pulling some data together from CERC STAT 3.
And again, in your FTP directory, you have your own copy of CERC STAT 3 for your institution that includes many more details.
So this report uses CERC STAT 3 to compare the total of number of loans made for your local patrons, loans made to users from another iShare library, and the total CERC.
This report is better used for general
peer-to-peer comparison than for answering statistical surveys.
You would want to use your individual CERC STAT 3 to calculate report totals to fill out surveys.
You'll notice there's a lot of notes here on the screen.
That's why the individual version would be better for that.
Next slide, please.
This final screenshot that I have for you is the reciprocal borrowing.
and that's two iShare patrons for FY23.
This report counts the number of iShare reciprocal borrowing charge transaction, that is, your library's item charged onsite at your library to a patron from another iShare library.
When reporting this data to ILLINET or other statistical surveys, if your library provides access to community borrowers through reciprocal borrowing agreements
and those borrowers have a unique patron group at your library.
You'll also want to include the charges that you'll see in CERC Stat 3 where that patron group is named in the reciprocal borrowing counts.
So that more information about that local user group you might be using
to record those reciprocal borrowing agreements you have established at your institution.
That'll be in that individual version of CERC STAT III that is uploaded to your library's CARLI FTP directory.
All right, I'm now going to pass this presentation back to my colleague, Ted.
Thanks, Debbie.
Move ahead here, and now we are getting into the collections reports that we have available.
IPEDS and ACRL are heavy on requesting information about both your print and electronic collections, but also other agencies may want to know how many actual items you have on the shelf, holdings that you have.
So these reports, as Debbie says, slice and dice your collection data through different perspectives.
Most of the data reports that we provide through the FTP server are snapshot reports.
They're timed to run on January or July 1st, rather, and capture information as of the end of your fiscal period.
Collection stats three and four are different in that those are measuring actual collection changes as of the dates things happen on records.
We'll take a look at that more closely.
Reporting to surveys, the titles that the record, the reports that you may find most useful are probably collection stats one and five
and Collection Stat 6 or 11 for title counts.
Let's go ahead and take a look at those more closely.
Here is a brief look at Collection Stat 1, which is an inventory snapshot of items you have present in each location.
Collection Stat 1 does not account for suppression or any other conditions.
If the lifecycle of an item in your catalog is active, then the item is counted.
according to the location it's held and the bibliographic record format information.
Notice that we have the number of items in reporter repository is the items in that location.
We can also look at collection stat five, another inventory snapshot, but rather than group items by location and bibliographic record material type,
This report shows you the counts by location and item policy.
Your institution may have used item policy to record details more narrowly than the bibliographic format, so it may give you a better sense of what types of materials are in each location and how many of them you've got.
While we're talking about item counts, we can briefly look at collection stat three, which might help you answer questions on the growth of your collection.
This report shows you the totals, the number of items added to each location, according to the item record creation date.
As a bit of trivia, this is one of the few collection reports that specifically looks at the dates when records were created and or modified.
rather than being a snapshot that is run on a specific date to capture data.
We're sorry to say that this doesn't address items withdrawn from collections, so you can't get a true net change for your collection size from this report.
But we think this will still be useful to you in most cases.
Moving on to title counts, which is very big for iPads reports.
The Collection Stat 6 is a title count snapshot report that is looking at all of the bibliographic records active in your repository and that are associated with physical locations.
These titles are not deduplicated and suppression or item statuses aren't considered.
Each record present that is active is counted once, and that is even if the title has holdings in multiple locations.
By contrast, we have Collection Stat 11, which is a refined variation on Collection Stat 6.
At the basic level, it is still a title count report, but is adding up active MARC records in your repository for physical resources.
This report goes further in a few ways, as it was designed to help institutions that have multiple libraries with different reporting requirements.
For example, a law library that operates separately from the main library.
With that in context, we can say that this report shows you the title count for each location where inventory is present.
This report does take into account whether BIBs or holdings are suppressed.
If your institution has a need to separate title counts by different operational groups, this report may be your better choice.
Moving on from physical collections to electronic collections, we have four electronic collection stats that are distributed.
Two of those, electronic stats one and three, go directly to your FTP account.
And electronic stat four is distributed to FTP, but has to be run by CARLI directly.
That is also true for electronic stat too, which gets posted to the CARLI website.
These are also reports run as snapshots on July 1st, so capturing everything as of a specific date, rather than looking at a date range according to the date things happened.
Let's take a closer look at two of these reports.
as we do get questions about which one is most appropriate at different times.
First, we have electronic stat one, which is your active portfolios by collection.
The copy of this report that you received shows you only the portfolios that are active in your institution zone.
As I mentioned, details of collections shared from the network zone are found on the CARLI website.
But you may also view them in the analytics version of electronic stat one that is shared from the Carly network folder in analytics.
This report is not a duplicated list of titles or duplicated count of titles.
It is counting specifically titles within each collection.
And that also requires you to know a little more about what kinds of resources are in each collection in order to use these in further reporting.
For example, you have the BMJ journals collection on the list, which you can assert is an electronic journal collection and count those titles accordingly.
but know also that Filmmaker's library will contain streaming videos rather than journals or ebooks.
To answer the more specific questions about title counts, we have electronic stat 4, and to the same degree electronic stat 3, which is specifically looking at e-journals only.
electronicstat4 does provide you a deduplicated title count of electronic resources that are active in your institution zone and that are shared to your institution from the network zone.
As a reminder, NZ titles include Carly Collections bought for all iShare members,
and Carly members that includes open access titles and if applicable to your institution group collections like the eREAD Illinois collection.
The electronic resource type column that you see here groups broader sets of resource types into the categories you see here which tend to be the categories requested on IPEDS form.
We are now
Having covered all of the reports that we wanted to highlight, now you want to know how you can get your hands on them.
I will pass along to Bradley.
Thank you, Ted.
Yeah, so as Ted mentioned, we've gone over so far what the annual stats package is, as well as a lot of what is in the various reports.
And now you might be wondering, where do I get them?
So there are two locations where the Excel files with your annual stats are sent after they're produced.
One is the Carly Files server, which is accessed via SFTP.
And the other option is box.com, which is a cloud storage website.
And I have links here with detailed instructions on both of those.
But I'll also go into each of them in a little more detail right now.
And Adrian has put both of the links in the chat as well.
Thank you, Adrian.
So if we can go to the next slide.
The first option is on the Carly file server, which you would access via SFTP.
People also often call it FTP, but I like to point out that if you're using an FTP client, you do want to switch it to SFTP.
That is part of the protocol and you can find that in the instructions.
So yes, when the stats are run, they are deposited as Excel files in your FTP account.
Your iShare liaison has the username and password for accessing that, and there is only one username and password per institution.
And if you are unsure how to access that or your liaison is not available, you can contact support and we can help with that.
I also need to point out that any files in your FTP directory will be deleted after 60 days.
So once a file is there, it's good to make sure to get in there and download it for yourself.
However, we did re-upload all of your statistics to your directories today.
For the most recent annual stats package, all of your files are there as of this morning, and you have 60 days from today to reaccess them.
And once again, that's the same link at the bottom with further instructions on SFTP.
But if you would like more hands-on help or a walkthrough, you can also contact support.
Next slide.
I just have a quick screenshot of kind of what it looks like in one of the FTP clients you could use.
This one's WinSCP.
And so once you log in, you should see a list of your annual statistics files there.
You could also use FileZilla.
You can use pretty much any FTP client.
Our website has instructions for WinSCP.
I like to use FileZilla a lot, so I'm pretty familiar with that.
So that.
And there's a more zoomed in option.
And then if we could go to the next slide, I'll just talk about Box.com a little bit.
So after they are deposited in your FTP space, we also put them in your shared folder on Box.com.
And so if you did not know, Carly provides each iShare institution with access to a shared folder on University of Illinois' Box.com platform.
If your institution uses Box.com, you should already have an account and a login.
If not, you will need to create an account, and it is possible to create free accounts up to a certain amount of space.
And then if you do that and you find you do not have access to your institution's Box folder, you can request access via our support email, support at carley.illinois.edu.
And please copy your library's iShare liaison in the message, just so that they're aware that you're accessing this information.
And once again, that's the same link that was shared a little earlier, but I put it here again for detailed instruction on accessing your box folder.
And then if we advance to the next slide, there's just a quick screen grab of kind of what you would expect to see, although I used RMC, which is kind of a testing
playground, but yours should look pretty similar to this.
If you log into Box and are looking for your stats, you might have to go into a folder, but it should be there.
Okay, next slide, please.
Okay, so in addition to the files that you can find via SFTP or Box.com, some of the reports are found on the Carly website as Debbie covered in some of her portion earlier.
And the way those are found is if you navigate to our website and to the iShare section of the website, you'll find an annual statistics tab, which is sort of in a menu over toward the right there.
And once you are there, if you scroll down, I'm sorry, I don't have a screen grab of that portion, but you will find the consortial ISHER annual statistics AFN stat one, stat two, AFN four and five, as well as the other stats that were covered today.
We also have historical statistics there going back to 2003, should you ever need that.
All right.
Finally, for finding out more on analytics reports, we do have some links here to the website documentation.
That first link is an overview of Alma Analytics, and then we have a link to training examples as well from the xlibris masterclass.
And then the bottom two links are the same links that I shared for Secure Shell and Box.
We really want you to have access to those links if you want more information on that.
And then I believe I now am done with my portion.
And I see we have a question already, but also if there are more questions, please feel free to type them in the chat or unmute yourself and ask away.
But I see a question now, where can I find electronics.for?
And I don't think this Debbie or Ted or Adrian want to cover that one.
Electronicstat 4 is a report that, as I mentioned, we have to hand compile that information, but it is and will be redistributed to your institutions through the FTP server.
It's a little tricky to do and tricky to automate, so that's why we have to pull it together to make sure that it captures accurately your titles and the network's own titles and deduplicates them and then presents that in the date ranges that fit your scenario.
It was run for July 23, but we may have not
Filed them with the right holders.
So, if you can look into seeing if those can be reloaded.
Yep, I will look into that right now.
I'm sorry, go ahead, Eugene.
There's a question.
Are we going to talk about ACRL stats?
I want to make sure I'm using the right reports.
I use the CUNY stats in the shared Alma Analytics folder.
So on the Carly website where, let me, I'm not sure, Tend, if you're able to open up a browser and we can navigate to the information we have for filling out the ACRL
There we go.
So here under iShare documentation, Ted's navigating to the annual statistics.
Then if at the top, if you'll scroll up a bit, there under iShare annual statistics package, that's the information about the individual reports.
So selecting that.
On this page then, if we scroll down a bit under section three, I think, yep, so we're at the bottom for how to fill out the reports.
So that's the ILLINET questions.
section, if you'll scroll down a little bit further, here's some information on IPEDS ACRL.
For circulation and for some of the questions where we know that there are questions with the ACRL stats, we've described which of the CARLI stats can be used to fill out those portions of the report.
I'm curious though since ACRL is a big
thing.
For the question in the chat, is there a specific portion of the report that you are hoping to fill out?
Feel free though to review this 3B about the IPEDS ACRL stats.
That FY22 on that, I need to go and just update the web page to say 23.
But if there is a specific part of that question that's not on this screen, feel free to let us know and we can look into it.
Another bit of trivia is in that since Carly is not an actual library with collections, we don't actually have logins to these systems for iPads or ACRL, so we don't usually get prompted with the survey questions to see what we got or what people are asking.
We usually have to find out after the fact what
what's changed and what people need if it's different than before.
There's another question.
It says, so it hasn't been run for July 2023.
I'm not sure which report we're talking about, but there's a comment okay, so it sounds like it was answered.
Yeah, that was the electronic stat for things.
Okay.
And is the AFN stat one added to the FTP each month?
I do not think we run that one monthly, but let me refresh my own memory here.
And if Bradley remembers, feel free to mention it.
I am also peeking if my computer will cooperate.
I think we just run that one annually for the annual reports.
So AFN 1 is the count of items loaned to borrowers from other iShare libraries.
were you thinking AFN 3, which is the titles counts?
And yeah, Bradley, please feel free to.
I'm showing AFN stats 1, 2, and 3 are monthly.
OK, that's great.
Then we'll want to update the website to include that information.
That was something that got added then after last year.
Yeah, and they usually show up on the second because we have to wait a day for all the data to be there.
Great.
Thank you.
There's a question.
How do I find total book titles, not volumes?
Right.
So book titles, you can use either Collection Stat 6 or Collection Stat 11.
For most institutions that do not have complex
sets of libraries or different reporting structures, usually collection stat six will suffice because that's counting up your active titles with physical inventory.
And then electronic collection, electronic stat four gives you your electronic inventory titles.
And if you only need an overall title count that isn't distinguished between physical and electronic, you would just add those two together.
That's the end of the current questions in the chat.
You can always post questions on any subject as well as the annual statistics in the chat or unmute yourself.
And also to address the side comment too about using ACRL reports from CUNY, there are actually a lot of custom reports for both IPEDS and ACRL created by other consortia and even Ex Libris has some in the Alma folder under the shared folders in Analytics.
They do try to coordinate these for
different years when the questions change.
We can't really address how closely they match what your institution is doing.
Basically, the long and short of it is that our reports are based, like we said, on the practices that have been in place for a long time.
But at any institution, you may find that the way you're doing something
needs a little more refinement than the standard report, and you can feel free to contact us for assistance in narrowing down the details to make sure it covers only what you want to have counted.
And that's totally acceptable.
And then we work over time to try and refine the entire package to be more closely associated with the reports that you have to give.
There's a new question in the chat.
Where did you say current volume counts are?
So current volume counts, the reports you would use for that could be collection stat one or collection stat five.
Are there any more questions?
Looks like we have a new question about UIC stats appear on the Carly website at the institution level.
Can we work with you to generate reports, especially AFN reports for individual locations?
depending on which pieces of data you wanted.
Alma is a bit more complicated in some ways with the way that library level data is.
So if you want to send an email to Carly support, we can put it into the list of things we're working on for AFN reports.
So if you'll describe what you're looking for, please send that into support and we'll see if it's information that we're able to tease out.
My colleague Martin and I have been working on and off for several months now, picking it up and putting it down as things come on to our task list to be able to tease out a bit more of library level information about transactions.
And so seeing what you're interested in at UIC would add to our
our testing of what we can get for library level AFN data.
So yeah, please send an email to Carly's support describing what you're hoping for.
Here's a question for link for stat six.
I'll go look for that.
Then there's a question.
Because we cannot run the AFN reports ourselves, is there a way to get the AFN 3 report added to a dashboard or scheduled to be emailed to certain library staff?
The staff who would most benefit from this report don't have access to FTP, so looking to see if we can streamline their access to this report.
We don't currently have that information on a dashboard.
We've talked about looking into dashboards.
It's something that's been just sort of hanging on our list, but we haven't quite created it yet.
We can definitely put that higher on our list to investigate.
It's more likely that we would probably have to schedule them to objects to be emailed.
rather than a dashboard, since the dashboard that you see in your institution is not necessarily connected to the network's own data.
So I think that's sort of the challenge here, is that the AFN data needs, AFN reports needs network's own data, which isn't really shareable across the network to institutions.
But that we would definitely need to know who that should be.
And then that would be details on who should get it and how to provide it.
But also, yeah, we'll have to think about how that might apply different ways.
I'll also add to that, while there might be limited staff who have access to the FTP data, those staff, since it's just an Excel file, those staff are welcome to, those staff who have access, since we upload those reports once a month, if someone at the institution in this meantime could make it part of their workflow to go to the FTP directory, download those files, and put them in a shared institutional space,
than anyone at your institution who needs the current version of AFN3 could have access to it.
So like what's in the FTP is just an Excel file.
So someone with access can go monthly, grab that file, put it where others can access it in this meantime.
So not everyone has to get the original version from the FTP.
It's just an Excel file.
So someone who has access can grab it and then put it somewhere where those locally can access it.
And I would just add that this is a model that we have with the shared SFTP spaces and have had for many, many years that not everyone has access, but it's sort of an extra task for those who do to make sure that they are getting information out of that space and giving it, distributing it at your library as needed.
So it's not just an annual stats type of thing.
Going back to the question about the link for stat six, which stat are you looking for, like collection stat six, or what?
I'm not sure which stat six you're looking for.
Oh, one for book titles.
um that's collection collection stat six is one of the reports that we distribute through the ftp server rather than posting on the website so there's not a link for that unless you're looking unless you're looking for the definition of what's in the report
There's a question.
I want to clarify that electronicstat4 is for digital electronic serial counts and that these are deduplicated?
Electronicstat4 is for electronic resource counts of different types.
So e-books, e-journals, streaming media, and things that are harder to classify, such as electronic maps or other kinds of objects.
They are deduplicated by title information, which actually might make them some cases overly deduplicated, but it's rather than the count of bibliographic records like in collections stat six groups everything down by title information.
I'm removing digital from the list since Carly doesn't have an Alma digital
subscription and digital objects if you did have a digital subscription would be measured differently in Alma Analytics.
There is an electronic step three that is specifically for electronic journal counts at your institution that are deduplicated in the institution.
If there's a comment or the FTP server box links are good for ACRL.
Ultimately, what I'm after is the best practice for which set of reports to use each year for ACRL so our data is consistent with you compare apples to apples each year to see our numbers change.
We certainly have information about how to use our statistics for ACRL, and we're going to continue to do these reports.
I know that previously we talked about other websites before we had the information about how to use our statistics, how our statistics maps to ACRL, etc.
But now we have information on this website that I'm putting in the chat.
There's information about how they map to ACRL and IPEDS and ILLINET.
But to some degree, actually, to most degrees, that kind of consistency for your own reporting is a local decision that you have to make as to which data fits the way your institution does business.
and you know that by having a we have a shared set of reports with the you know the definitions that we've laid out and those may fit you know 90 of institutions and then there may be some that need something more specific and some that need you know a different kind of specific specificity because we don't know we we don't know what you've done with your
in reporting your data previously we've just we're just you know we're providing all of the data that we have but you know your predecessors may have said at one point oh we're not going to count anything in reserves that shows up as a title count or a volume count that's in reserves so we're going to skip that
you know, microfiche information that's there as well, or different categories of things that they feel may not have applied to previous surveys.
And, you know, I think the best practice in those cases is to simply document what answers you've chosen and how you chose that data and keep that information on file for consecutive years.
so you are able to compare apples to apples.
I'm muted.
There's a comment that ACRL starts with the questions from iPads, so if you fill out ACRL first, there's a mechanism to upload that info into iPads so you don't have to do it twice FYI.
And if there's a, since you all, since the iShare libraries are all filling out the ACRL stats and the iPad stats yearly, if there is a question that when you're reading it in that survey and you're wondering how your colleagues at other iShare libraries are filling out that question, since there is so much variation in how, like there's so much variation in what the questions are, and then so much variation in how each institution is structured and how that's all set up,
you would be more than welcome to send an email to the Carly email lists, so whether that's the iShare liaisons list or the reports list or public services list, and just say, hey, I'm working on iPads, and I'm looking at question 12 about whatever it is.
I'm unsure how I should be filling this out.
I would love to talk to one of you all about how your library is structured and how you do this data and see if you can get some assistance from
your colleagues in the Carly libraries as well.
Knowing again, though, that what works at Institution A, your institution might be structured differently.
So what works at Institution A might not work exactly at Institution B, but hearing how others fill out the reports might be helpful to you as well.
So feel free to reach out to Carly support.
Also feel free to use those Carly email lists to be in touch with your colleagues.
If you're, and then, yep, thank you, Denise.
Denise has just put in a survey help guide for the ACRL documentation.
Let me put in a link for the email list that you can sign up for.
As time has passed and email lists have become less of a modern thing, the traffic on our Carly email list is less than it used to be.
So if you sign up for email lists,
There won't be so many messages that it becomes frustrating.
You can just sort them into a folder in your email management system and have them there.
But I'd recommend, yeah, sign up for the lists that are of interest to you.
If you are your institution's iShare liaison or director, you'll already be on some lists.
Well, we've run over time.
We did record this session in case you want to go back and look at things or if somebody else wanted to see this.
And we'll post the recording after the processing is done and also post the slides.
Thank you for coming.