Statistics: Dates - physical item counts

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Legend: NOT STARTED IN PROGRESS STALLED DECIDED

Recommendation

For physical materials, see https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qBB29zs2Ztp_P2EbFrsBr8p_BpLv2Xc4-ZUkZyNM5Iw/edit#heading=h.li2chn5mjo2w used to build Prototype Version 2 (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eoN1qFGTYA4JQG_SY89UvhznCvgGZj6w/ ) which does not use any date variables.

If item addition and/or withdrawal by fiscal year are desired, please consider the following:

• For Added counts:

  • Use “Physical Items“.”Physical Item Details”.”Lifecycle” = Active AND

  • Use “Physical Items”.”Item Creation Date” OR

  • Use “Physical Items”.”Item Receiving Date” and find out why there are significant impacts at San Diego, Davis, Irvine, Riverside, and Santa Barbara when dates are added into the data extract/report build in Alma Analytics.

• For Withdrawn counts:

  • Use “Physical Items”.”Item Modification Date” = Deleted and/or None or NULL AND

  • Find out reasons behind the usage of the Deleted value AND/OR

  • Encourage identification of a common field to house a withdrawal/deletion note which consists of at least the initial of the person accountable for the withdrawal/deletion, date of the withdrawal/deletion, and reason behind the withdrawal/deletion for not only statistical reporting purposes but also accountability purposes.

Note: Pending SILS and ExLibris explanation behind significant differences in counts when dates are used in the report/data extraction builds.

Impact

Reasoning

After review, the AASA-PT Harmonization group determined that

Background

The AASA-PT Harmonization group reviewed all the UCOP statistics data that can be retrieved via Alma Analytics. Factors considered during this review were the existing UCOP, ACRL and ARL requirements.

• UCOP statistical reporting are collected for risk management purposes.

• ARL reporting guidelines would like institutions to be consistent with their reporting such that institutions should continue reporting counts for criteria reported initial years should be continually reported in subsequent years, including the groupings of the institution types.

• ACRL and ARL statistical reporting requirements allow focus in counts reflecting what has been catalogued.

• CEAL statistical reporting requirements would like to know what has not yet been catalogued.

While reasons for statistical reporting are unknown and not shared; there exists suggested reasons for statistical reporting for studies on values and impacts of libraries and their collections which encourages desires for further reporting of changes in the libraries and collections, where counts of additional and withdrawal of items each year are significant in the report build. As a result the following variables and a combination of them were reviewed:

• Physical Items

  • Lifecycle

  • Material Type v. Resource Type

  • Item Creation Date v. Creation Date

  • Item Receiving Date v. Receiving Date v. Receiving Date (Calendar)

  • Item Modification Date v. Modification Date

Other variables were also reviewed and considered but they played minor roles for the build. They included locations, item policies, call numbers, etc. They are modifiable and require significant study and maintenance at each institution level, similar to the material type option listed above, which we have decided not to focus on and use for the Fiscal Year 2022-2023 UCOP Stats reporting.

This decision page reports on the comparisons and decisions behind the bolded items in the above listed variables reviewed.

*Material Type v. Resource Type not reported in this decision page as neither of them show significant correlations with the date variables. Please see separate decision page on them.

Observations about the current data:

Physical Items

• Lifecycle

  • Three values are available in this “Physical Items“.”Physical Item Details”.”Lifecycle” variable:

    • Active, which allows us to know what items' records are active, discoverable, and retrievable in patron-facing interface of the catalog.

    • Deleted, which allows us to know what items' records are not discoverable or retrievable in patron-facing interface of the catalog.

    • None, which allows us to know what items' records are not discoverable or retrievable in patron-facing interface of the catalog. These records are also associated with records without creation dates and possibly other pertinent metadata not yet determined in our knowledge without consideration with ExLibris.

  • Although useful by ExLibris' design, based on the above knowledge and our knowledge of our current practices and ExLibris' design for Alma Analytics Subject Areas, where full record of each record’s modification history is not considered; filtering based on lifecycle, where lifecycle equals “Deleted” and/or “None” will cause the following issues:

    • Exclusion of items that were deleted from the repository after the reporting deadline but before the report run date. For example, if a weeding project happens in August 2023 and hundreds of print items and their associated records are removed, a report looking for the items from before July 2023 that runs in October 2023 will exclude those items, even though they were still in the collection before July 2023.

    • Items deleted by mistake for various reasons and circumstances not explained and/or not noted in record suggests irrelevance of the lifecycle variable, especially for those with lifecycles of at least “Deleted”. To account for the deleted items, it would require investigations into reasons and circumstances behind the deletions of records and enforcements of practices in flagging and noting the details of such deletions into certain fields and variables that would allow easy filtering and/or usage of such available variable in Alma Analytics.

• Modification Date

  • There exists two available modification date options:

    • “Physical Items”.”Item Modification Date”, which cleans up and harmonizes the value available in “Physical Items”.”Physical Items Details”.”Modification Date”. ExLibris documentation reads that “The Item Modification date is the date of the last change to the item. Therefore, if on January 19, 2016 the item was in process type Acquisition, on January 20, 2016 the item was in process type Request, and on January 21, 2016 the item was in process type Loan (and no additional change to the item was made after January 21), the Item Modification Date is January 21, 2016.“

    • “Physical Items”.”Physical Items Details”.”Modification Date”, which allows us to know when the item record is modified. ExLibris documentation reads that this variable “Holds the date the physical item was modified“.

  • Alma-based findings not yet attempted. No similar issues and findings as those found for other date variables are found for modification date variables. AASA-PT team looking for reasons to dive into a study on modification date options. So far, per common knowledge and experience, each of the modification date options suggest automatic generation due to any alteration or modifications attempted. Although not senior seasoned users, per experience in Alma Analytics thus far, the recent availability of the Physical Items Historical Event Subject Area in late 2022, and the current data available in such recent available area provides no complete historical data on the changes behind each record type, be it one on each physical item or one on each bibliographic record.

  • Alma Analytics data-based findings:

    • When crossed with Lifecycle = Delete, modification dates can be useful to determine and account for items withdrawn from the collection (see Prototype Version 1 at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IBV9tKyvO3xq-UZeuLoeEViSmBwgp2YO/edit#gid=552748451 ). However, due to the problems noted in the Lifecycle section of this decision page, certain institutions are requesting to opt out of reporting annual add and withdrawal counts in statistical reporting.

    • No significant findings in the values of the modification date variables.

      • Values in “Physical Items”.”Physical Items Details”.”Modification Date” suggests automatic generation by system when item records are modified. If record has not yet been modified, no modification date is available.

      • Values in “Physical Items”.”Item Modification Date” suggests that this dimension and variable was created to make use of and harmonize any discrepancies found in “Physical Items”.”Physical Items Details”.”Modification Date”. Since none was experienced there, no discrepancies are found in this variable.

  • Based on the reported knowledge and practices, “Physical Items”.”Item Modification Date” would be the best variable to use to determine when the items' records were last modified, especially when the record of the item was deleted. Doing so would encourage leaderships to consider oversights in understanding and reporting about the practices in the deletion of records in the usage of SILS.

• Creation Date

  • Per common database design knowledge, automatic date and time stamps for when records are created are expected, resulting in the choice of creation date values. There exists two available creation date options:

    • “Physical Items”.”Item Creation Date”, which cleans up and harmonizes the value available in “Physical Items”.”Physical Items Details”.”Creation Date” (variable mentioned below; ExLibris documentation reads that this variable “Stores the item creation date in a date format such as 2/29/2014” and that “All date dimensions include dates up to and including 30 years back and 20 years forward. So, for example, if today is March 17, 2021: The earliest loan date that would appear is March 17, 1991. The latest due date that would appear is March 17, 2041.“).

    • “Physical Items”.”Physical Items Details”.”Creation Date”, which allows us to know when the record on the item was created. (ExLibris documentation reads that this variable: “Holds the date the physical item was created” and that “This date is assigned by Alma when the physical item is created.“)

  • Alma-based findings:

    • The abovementioned definition in ExLibris documentations are questionable due to the Alma Analytics data-based findings mentioned in below section.

    • Location of where originating physical item creation date field in Alma which corresponds to those in Alma Analytics is unknown and not yet provided to AASA-PT analysts.

    • There are three possibilities of how this field is populated in Alma for Alma Analytics:

      • Items are created on order and, as part of predictions, before the material is received AND/OR

      • Using the “Add Item” button in Physical Item Editor module upon finding bibliographic and/or holdings record AND/OR

      • Using other record creation options and practices behind outside of Alma such as those needed and used for initial data migration purposes.

• Alma Analytics data-based findings:

  • Initial findings in usage of creation date is documented at https://docs.google.com/document/d/125dx-__jZOHNRH0ysuRLtEr1j33HjV7e/; summarizing that there are ongoing additional records with no or blank creation dates provided over time. Therefore, setting Creation Date = NULL as a data-extract-, report-development cleanup and the like or filter will not provide accurate counts of how many records were created in each specific, non-NULL fiscal year and/or date ranges. This impacts at least 14% (4.9 million records of this finding out of the 34+ million total amount of records made available in Alma Analytics) of the records.

  • Recent findings from comparing inclusion and exclusion of creation date in report design criteria show that significant records are dropped when dates such as Creation Date is included. Compare https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IBV9tKyvO3xq-UZeuLoeEViSmBwgp2YO/edit#gid=552748451 where Creation Date is included against https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eoN1qFGTYA4JQG_SY89UvhznCvgGZj6w/ where Creation Date is excluded. See Table 3.

  • Based on the following and our knowledge of the campuses' current practices, “Physical Items”.”Item Creation Date” would be the best variable to use, if reporting counts of items added into the catalog by fiscal year and/or a particular date range is needed:

    • “Physical Items”.”Physical Items Details”.”Creation Date” is the raw data transferred from Alma to Alma Analytics.

    • “Physical Items”.”Item Creation Date” is the harmonization/data cleanup processed variable based on the Physical Items.Physical Items Details.Creation Date.

Table 3. Comparison of counts when creation date is used. The above table compares the total counts at each institution when Item Creation Date is used and not used in the report build. For details behind the counts, see https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xOqWAWqn1P7uF5gkZbPZ5rOCDrWctZxencx4yf50_z0/edit#gid=471658574, where Version 1 is at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IBV9tKyvO3xq-UZeuLoeEViSmBwgp2YO/edit#gid=552748451 and Version 2 is at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eoN1qFGTYA4JQG_SY89UvhznCvgGZj6w/. Causes are not yet determined, and institutions impacted are highlighted in red.

* Cannot determine why there is a smaller count in Version 2 for UCLA. Version 1 and 2 were both ran on May 22, 2023 between 8 and 9 a.m. Although Version 2’s UCLA did not finish running until 8:57 am, there should not be that much of a difference in the output. Numbers in Table 4, which were based on Version 1’s build, shows that the numbers for UCLA was closer to Version 2, too. See Table 4.

• Receiving Date

  • There exists three available receiving date options:

    • “Physical Items”.”Item Receiving Date”, which cleans up and harmonizes the value available in “Physical Items”.”Physical Items Details”.”Creation Date” (variable mentioned below; ExLibris documentation reads that this variable “Stores the item creation date in a date format such as 2/29/2014” and that “All date dimensions include dates up to and including 30 years back and 20 years forward. So, for example, if today is March 17, 2021: The earliest loan date that would appear is March 17, 1991. The latest due date that would appear is March 17, 2041.“).

    • “Physical Items”.”Physical Items Details”.”Receiving Date (calendar)”, which allows us to know when the record on the item was created. (ExLibris documentation reads that this variable: “Holds the date the physical item was created” and that “This date is assigned by Alma when the physical item is created.“)

    • “Physical Items”.”Physical Items Details”.”Receiving Date”, which allows us to know when the record on the item was created. (ExLibris documentation reads that this variable: “The Receiving Date table is a dimension table that stores details about the date the item was received by the library”; “Stores the item modification date in a date format such as 2/29/2014“; and that “The date the material was actually received/activated for the first time.“)

  • Alma-based findings:

    • The following is a screen capture of the receive date that is designed to collect such values in Alma:

      

      This above screen capture suggests that the Receiving Date variable in Alma Analytics was a free-text textbox in Alma and that the Receiving Date (Calendar) variable in Alma Analytics is the calendar dropdown in Alma. This means that end users are allowed to enter the date values manually and can use the calendar dropdown to enter standardized date values. This also suggests that the data transfer from Alma to Alma Analytics did not include a process to clean the manually entered date values such that dates entered with m/d/yy are not read as mm/dd/yyyy date formats that are needed for sorting and filtering in Alma Analytics. There is also a possibility that these manually entered values are read as strings rather than dates such that Alma Analytics are not able to filter them correctly.

  • Alma Analytics-based findings

    • Dates beyond today’s dates are found within this variable which suggests that investigations and cleanups are desired (see https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DtYRcjTn9WVCJsEUggGQGmWE-1Yr5hW2/ ).

    • Findings summarized at https://docs.google.com/document/d/125dx-__jZOHNRH0ysuRLtEr1j33HjV7e/ show that there are also ongoing additional records with no or blank receive dates and that Alma Analytics cannot understand a significant amount of the non-blank dates.

  • Institution-Level Consultation findings:

    • Some campuses report that they do not use this date.

  • Based on the following and our knowledge of the campuses' current practices, “Physical Items”.”Item Receiving Date” would be the best variable to use, if reporting counts of items added into the collection by fiscal year and/or a particular date range is needed:

    • “Physical Items”.”Physical Items Details”.”Receiving Date” is the raw data transferred from the corresponding text-free field in Alma to Alma Analytics.

    • “Physical Items”.”Physical Items Details”.”Receiving Date (Calendar)” is the raw data transferred from the corresponding calendar dropdown menu in Alma to Alma Analytics.

    • “Physical Items”.”Item Receiving Date” is the harmonization/data cleanup processed variable based on “Physical Items”.”Physical Items Details”.”Receiving Date” and “Physical Items”.”Physical Items Details”.”Receiving Date (Calendar)”.

Table 4. Comparison of counts and impacts when the dates considered are used in build. The above table compares the counts and shows the calculated impacts based on the counts with and without the dates listed.

Item Creation Date and Item Receiving Date are the harmonization/data cleanup processed variable provided by ExLibris in Alma Analytics which would be useful for filtering for adding and withdrawal accountabilities by certain dates and date ranges, including fiscal years. These two variables are compared with a build without any dates for comparisons in this Table.

Impact (numeric) (D) is calculated by (C-B) or (C-A), whichever is greater. If more than 500,000 in difference, impact (E) is significant and a percentage of the significance is calculated into percentage (F).

Institutions with significant impacts (San Diego, Davis, Irvine, Riverside, and Santa Barbara), regardless of which date variable to use or not, which require attention are high-lighted in red. These institutions should consider a preference for Version 2, where no dates are used in the build.

Those highlighted in green (NRLF, SRLF, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Merced, and Santa Cruz) should consider a preference for Version 1 and use Item Creation Date to count toward items added each fiscal year.

Options Considered

References

ExLibris. (2023). “Physical Items”. Retrieved from https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/Alma/Product_Documentation/010Alma_Online_Help_(English)/080Analytics/Alma_Analytics_Subject_Areas/Physical_Items last accessed May 26, 2023.

ExLibris. (2023). “Subject Areas”. Retrieved from https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/Alma/Product_Documentation/010Alma_Online_Help_(English)/080Analytics/Alma_Analytics_Subject_Areas last accessed May 26, 2023.

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