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After review, the AASA-PT Harmonization group discovered that resource type is much more consistent across campuses than material typedetermined that Resource Type provides the best balance of consistency, accuracy, and granularity for UCOP reporting.
Background
The AASA-PT Harmonization group reviewed all the UCOP statistics data that can be retrieved via Alma Analytics. One of the factors considered during this review was the existing ACRL and ARL requirements.
One of the challenges for campuses are facing is what UCOP is asking for is that the terminology of UCOP statistical reports is not precicely reflected in our Alma system. As a result, campuses spend a significant amount of time attempting to manipulate the manipulating Alma data into the requested format. One of the goals of the harmonization group was to find the easiest way to retrieve these types of statistics using an approach that takes advantage of Alma’s functionality.Within Alma, Material type is an alterable set of fields, and campuses have customized them extensively according to local needs. However, resource . In order to do so, Team members took several approaches to assess options:
The Team ran reports from the Network Zone to determine how the data looked when using different fields to categorize items.
AASA members developed a survey and gathered feedback from their campuses on the impact of using Resource Type for the UCOP statistics.
AASA members shared their own experiences using different fields and approaches with Alma data.
After evaluation options, Resource Type from the bibliographic record was chosen.
Resource type comes directly from fields in the bibliographic record (i.e., LDR and 008) and, as a result, tends to be more consistent across campuses.
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Compared to Material Type, Resource Type also categorizes significantly fewer items as “unknown” and “undefined” types (500,000 compared to over 2.6 million).
Options Considered
Option 1 | Option 2 | Option 3 | Option 4 | Option 5 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Description | "Physical Items". "Physical Item Details". "Material Type" | "Physical Items". "Bibliographic Details". "Resource Type" | "Physical Items". "Bibliographic Details". "Category of Material" | "Physical Items". "Bibliographic Details". "Material Type" | Other data elements |
Pros | Available at the item level. | Already standardized across campuses. Fewer unknown/null results | Standardized across campuses because it comes directly from position 0 of the 007 | ||
Cons | Customized extensively based on local campus needs. If we wanted to use this, we’d need to standardize local cataloging across campuses. | Campuses cannot pull Resource Type for CDL-managed Electronic Resources. These numbers would need to be pulled within NZ Analytics. Because resource type isn’t at the physical item level, some granularity will be lost. [1] | Limited to 15 categories that do not correspond to UCOP or third-party reporting categorizations. |
[1] Example from UC Irvine Law: 65 CDs that come with regularly-updated legal materials have
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