Statistics: Categories for item counts

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Legend: not started IN PROGRESS STALLED decided

Status	Decided
Description	Determine which Analytics field should be used to determine counts by type or category of material.
Decision summary	Use Resource Type from the bibliographic record, because it provides the most consistent and descriptive option across campuses.
Owning group	AASAP Team sils-aasa-l@listserv.ucop.edu
Approver
Consulted	AASAP Team members consulted locally.
Informed	Leadership Group
Decision-making process
Priority
Target decision date	Apr 24, 2023
Date decided	Apr 24, 2023

Recommendation

For physical materials, use "Physical Items"."Bibliographic Details"."Resource Type.”

For electronic materials, use "E-Inventory"."Bibliographic Details"."Resource Type".

Impact

Stakeholder group	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 determined 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 is that the terminology of UCOP statistical reports is not precicely reflected in Alma. As a result, campuses spend a significant amount of time 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. 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.
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

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

"Physical Items"."Physical Item Details"."Material Type" = “CD-ROM” and
"Physical Items"."Bibliographic Details"."Resource Type” = “Book - Physical” or “Other Serial - Physical”

Overall, however, the number of mis-matches is small. On the whole UC Irvine campus, for example, only ~315 CD-ROM items have an incorrect "Bibliographic Details". "Resource Type” value 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

Action/Point Person	Expected Completion Date	Notes	Status
AASA-PT		Review Draft
AASA-PT	Apr 24, 2023	Final Decision