Facilitating Resource Allocation Decision through Data Mining: The Case of UTM Library

Library has vastly developed from conventional services to digital services in these recent years. The demand from the users, institutions, international organization needs and technology advancement has change the library either in their budget cost or in their decision making approach. The library organization nowadays undeniably relies on bibliographic data and digital sources outcome to plan for activities and future development, however few have used this as an advantage. We chose the Library of Universiti Telcnologi Malaysia for the case study as it has nearly 1 million records of collection in various formats. The huge library bibliographic data could be statistically patterned and clustered for indicating relationship among them. Bibliomining term that are similar to library data mining fields are tools that can visualize how libraries manage their cost, staff activity, customer service, user needs, marketing, popular books, circulation, reference transaction, quality of collection, educational programs etc. The purpose of this paper is to propose the implementation of bibliomining to the library data warehousing as a tool to assist library management in making decision. The data set consists of patrons' data and loan registration records between 2005 and 2010. The loan registration record contains each patron's ID number, time and detailed information regarding book loaned and their call numbers. The loan registration record has a huge data set and therefore, efficient technique must be applied in the process of analyzing and pre-processing. An interview with UTM Deputy Chief Librarian will be conducted to validate all the findings.