See Best Practices for Decision Pages and Tags for groups
Legend: NOT STARTED IN PROGRESS STALLED DECIDED
Recommendation
Resource Type provides the most consistent and descriptive option across campuses. For physical materials, the resource type would be pulled from "Physical Items"."Bibliographic Details"."Resource Type". For electronic materials, the resource type would be pulled from "E-Inventory"."Bibliographic Details"."Resource Type".
Impact
Stakeholder group | Impact |
|---|---|
UC Libraries | Determinations around what and how we report are for the most part managed/owned by the UC Libraries (i.e., shared ownership). |
CDL | CDL analysts, who are responsible for building report queries at the Network Zone according to templates agreements upon by the UC Libraries, will functionally have to exclude items and titles based a variety of parameters – likely resource type and location (specific to campus special collections), and any another group of query parameters identified by campus partners. |
UCOP | Likely, this specifically pertains to our Risk Management Office, who reports holdings information to our insurer, for compliance purposes. |
Reasoning
After review, the AASA-PT Harmonization group discovered that resource type is much more consistent across campuses than material type.
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 campuses are facing is what UCOP is asking for is not reflected in our Alma system. As a result, campuses spend a significant amount of time attempting to manipulate the 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 so campuses have customized them extensively according to local needs. However, resource type come directly from the bib header and, as a result, tends to be much more consistent across campuses.
AASA members were provided a survey and requested to gather feedback from their campuses on the impact of using Resource Type for the UCOP statistics.
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 | |||
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] |
[1] Example from UC Irvine Law: 65 CDs that come with regularly-updated legal materials have the value “CD-ROM” in "Physical Items"."Physical Item Details"."Material Type", but “Book - Physical” or “Other Serial - Physical” in "Physical Items"."Bibliographic Details"."Resource Type.” Overall, however, the number of mis-matches is small. On the whole UC Irvine campus, for example, only ~315 CD-ROM items have "Bibliographic Details". "Resource Type” values of “Book - Electronic” or “Book - Physical”. In a system with millions of Electronic and Physical books, these differences are not significant.
Action Log
Action/Point Person | Expected Completion Date | Notes | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
AASA-PT | Review Draft | ||
AASA-PT |
| Final Decision |