Library information provider OCLC Research, US, and OhioLINK have released a report of, and the data set used in, a joint study of OhioLINK circulation, to better understand the usage patterns of books in academic libraries and support further research in this area. OhioLINK, an initiative of the Ohio Board of Regents, is a consortium of 90 Ohio colleges and university libraries and the State Library of Ohio, working to bring books, articles, electronic resources and digital information to more than 600,000 students, faculty, and staff across the Buckeye State.
The study, which incorporated usage data from 2007-2008, was limited to books and manuscripts because these materials typically circulate, and circulation is a significant element in evaluating collections.
The report, OhioLINK—OCLC Collection and Circulation Analysis Project 2011, provides an overview of the study, a description of how the data was analysed and made available, and suggested uses for the data. The report is accompanied online by an extensive set of Excel spreadsheets that analyse the usage patterns observed in the study.
The data used in the report was from a collaborative OCLC-OhioLINK Collection and Circulation Analysis project that joined OhioLINK circulation data with WorldCat bibliographic records to produce a base file of circulation records for nearly 30 million different books. Ninety institutions participated in the study, including 16 universities, 23 community/technical colleges, 50 private colleges and the State Library of Ohio. The size of the combined collection and the number and diversity of participating institutions make this by far the largest and most comprehensive study of academic library circulation ever undertaken.
Librarians have long espoused the belief that 80 percent of a library's circulation is driven by about 20 percent of the collection. The analysis of a year's circulation statistics from this study indicates that 80 percent of the circulation is driven by just 6 percent of the collection.
The dataset generated by the project has also been made publicly available under the Open Data Commons Attribution license (an open license) to download for study and research. It is the largest and most diverse set of academic usage data for books ever collected. Because the data analysis described in the report represents only a fraction of what might be done with the data, OhioLINK and OCLC Research made the data publicly available so it could be studied to its full potential and other libraries could correlate it against their own data to determine how it compares with their individual use patterns.
The current OCLC-OhioLINK project team will also continue to study the data.
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