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Analytics: Circulation Activity Comparison Tool
In January, we introduced you to a CUNY OLS dashboard showing usage of our main library systems. That dashboard continues to be updated each month and we recently improved it, giving it in a new look and providing more school-specific detail.
Now we have a fun new offering: the Circulation Activity Comparison Tool!
Features
- Select Date Type to change the view from monthly to display by weekdays or by hours
- Click on a single Event Type to view only one type of circulation event: Loans, Returns, or Requests
- The title of each chart will change automatically to display the current selections for that chart
- Remove all filter selections by clicking Reset at the left under the charts
- Remove your last filter selection by clicking Undo in the same location
- Includes data from Fiscal Years 2014, 2015, and 2016 (through March 2016)
- Filter by a single SubLibrary or an entire Library (select all relevant SubLibraries in the drop-down selection box)
- Click on the Loans line (or Returns or Requests) to display that line’s transaction counts (as we did in the above image)
- Fiscal Year and SubLibrary selections are applied to one chart only
- Select Date Type and other selections are applied to both charts
Using this tool, you can easily
- Check your library’s peak hours for loans, returns, and requests
- View your library’s traffic by day of the week
- Compare 2 Fiscal Years by selecting different years on the left and right
- Compare 2 Libraries (select all SubLibraries for one on the left and for another on the right)
- Compare 2 SubLibraries
- Mix and match
Acknowledgments
OLS is currently using Tableau Public’s free service to bring you this information. Check the Tableau Public Status page if you can’t access our OLS dashboards.
We owe a huge thank you to Jennifer Murray at SUNY Buffalo for sharing not only their Tableau dashboard but also the logic used to create it. This allowed us to build on the work they did and adapt it to our needs at CUNY. In that same spirit, the logic we used appears below.
Technical Details
The data source is the Aleph Z35 Events table.
The selected fields are: Time Stamp (includes date, hour), Date (formatted), SubLibrary, and Circulation Event Type (groups 1 or more related events together)
Circulation Event Type Criteria
- Loan: selected loan transactions
- Return: return transactions
- Requests: hold request transactions
Other Details
- Limit to certain transaction types
- Limit transaction dates to the 2 previous fiscal years plus the current fiscal year (July 2013-current date)
- The order-by option is not required and merely makes the output easily scannable
- The output is tab-delimited
SQL
set heading off
set pause off
set pagesize 0
set linesize 2900
set colsep |
select z35_time_stamp || chr(9) || substr( z35_event_date, 5, 2) || '/' ||
substr( z35_event_date, 7, 2) || '/' || substr( z35_event_date, 1, 4)
|| chr(9) || Z35_SUB_LIBRARY || chr(9) || ( CASE
WHEN z35_event_type IN ('50','56') THEN 'LOAN'
WHEN z35_event_type in ('61') THEN 'RETURN'
WHEN z35_event_type in ('71','72','73','74') THEN 'REQUEST'
END)
from xxx50.z35 -- where 'xxx' is your library prefix
where z35_event_type in ('50','56','61','71','72','73','74')
and z35_event_date > '20130630'
and z35_event_date < '20160401'
order by z35_time_stamp
;
exit
Popular OneSearch Searches: March 2016
The following is a list of the top OneSearch search term at each campus (and the CUNY-wide OneSearch instance) between 03/01/2016 and 03/31/2016, organized by the number of times the query had been searched at that library:
- “social media” (275)
- 50 essays (169)
- “thirty years war” (112)
- jane austin (103)
- phillips “urban social work” (86)
- “gun control” (84)
- room key (83)
- adhd / children / education (79)
- the irish holocaust (63)
- carolyn rovee-collier (61)
- social mobility / united states (57)
- factory workers (54)
- souls of black folk (43)
- soylent green (38)
- water (37)
- poverty / poor / accountant* (31)
- youth video games (26)
- college readiness (23)
- english only (18)
- asian american career development: a qualitative analysis (10)
- america dancing (7)
- “cambridge associates” (4)
(The slashes indicate that the keywords were entered into individual search boxes on the Advanced Search screen.)
When we performed the top search in that library’s instance of OneSearch, we found some interesting audiovisual material, including a lot of news coverage about the role of social media during natural disasters (such as Hurricane Sandy) and social revolutions (such as the Arab Spring).
If you haven’t explored all that OneSearch has to offer, what are you waiting for!?
Popular OneSearch Searches: February 2016
The following is a list of the top OneSearch search term at each campus (and the CUNY-wide OneSearch instance) between 02/01/2016 and 02/29/2016, organized by the number of times the query had been searched at that library:
- ellis island (205)
- interpersonal spacing (136)
- washington state (120)
- phillips “urban social work” (119)
- “code switching” (78)
- “social media” (76)
- french revolution (75)
- wilderness therapy (60)
- the industrial diet (55)
- world music global journey (52)
- road to brown (48)
- global warming (47)
- culture and personality (36)
- climate change (25)
- willowbrook state school (25)
- octavia butler (21)
- beginning algebra tobey (20)
- lipkind, william (17)
- postpartum depression (12)
- black panthers huey newton (8)
- the death and life of the great american school system (8)
- the functional art (5)
When we performed the top search in that library’s instance of OneSearch, we found some great photos, including this one from the Library of Congress:
Source: Library of Congress
If you haven’t explored all that OneSearch has to offer, what are you waiting for!?
Popular OneSearch searches in 2015
The year 2015 marked the first full calendar year during which we had our discovery system, OneSearch, up and running across the CUNY libraries. It was a big year, with over 3.7 million searches performed across the University!
If you’re curious about the types of searches performed in an individual campus’s instance of OneSearch, you can access the back office and find all kinds of reports, statistics, and analytics about our users’ experiences with and behaviors within OneSearch. (More information about accessing OneSearch reports is available on the OLS Support Site.)
However, we think it’s also fun to see the big picture! The following is a list of the top search term at each campus (and the CUNY-wide OneSearch instance) between 01/01/2015 and 12/31/2015, organized by the number of times the query had been searched at that library:
henry ford constribution (3,997)
bibliographic and web tools for alternative media. (609)
interpersonal space (606)
gentrification (455)
stereotype threat (446)
spider silk treat damaged nerves (412)
arranged (392)
eliot t s / prufrock (351) *
spread of christianity (285)
fatherless children (265)
self awareness (244)
climate change (238)
students with traumatic brain injury (187)
who moved my cheese (183)
your college experience (162)
schmidt, elizabeth. peasants (161)
ocd treatment (122)
globalization (115)
public housing race poverty (98)
death penalty (58)
pro choice (54)
miss america pageant (31)
* In the reports, slashes (“/”) indicate separate search fields used within the “Advanced Search” screen.
Feel free to peruse the OneSearch back office for local statistics and check out the OLS statistics dashboard for more number-y goodness!
Analytics: Meet the OLS Dashboard
Here it is: version 2.0 of our new OLS Dashboard:
You can enter the OLS Dashboard from the link above or go directly to a full view of any of the included graphs via the links below:
Information about the source data for each of the graphs is displayed at the bottom of the individual graph page, not on the overview/dashboard page.
Try these features:
- Click on a legend point in any of the graphs. This will offer a popup window with 2 options: “Keep Only” and “Exclude.” Selecting one of these options will filter the information only in this single graph, changing it to display only the selected data. Note, however, that the static 0-300K vertical axis makes it difficult to see individual school data.
- There is an “Undo” option at the bottom-left of the page to remove a single filter action. Use the “Reset” option to remove multiple filtering steps at once.
- Double-click on any graph to zoom in on the data. Once that is done, a “Home” button appears to take you back to the original view. The “Undo” and “Reset” buttons also work on these changes.
OLS is currently using Tableau Public’s free service to bring you this information. (Check the Tableau Public Status page if you can’t get to our OLS Dashboard.)
[Note that this blog post was updated on 27 April 2016 to point to v2.0 of the OLS Dashboard. The image at the top is still the original v1.0 OLS Dashboard.]
