Taming the Wilde: Collaborating With Expertise for Faster, Better, Smarter Collection Analysis

The importance of collection assessment and evaluation has been a hot topic due to increasing budget restrictions and the need to prove worth to stakeholders through evidence-based evaluations. More robust collection analyses, like comparisons of holdings usage to ILL requests, and gap analyses, are increasingly embraced by the library community. Less thought, however, has been given to how to best conduct these analyses to ensure that the cleanest data is used and that the data tells the right story. The data to do these types of analyses often reside in complex systems and web-environments, which may not be fully understood by the collection managers or subject librarians. The University of Houston Libraries embarked on a largescale gap analysis of the collection by subject area. The key component to success was quickly, accurately, and properly mining the data sources such as Sierra and the electronic resource management system. Our collection team contends that collaboration with expertise in the Resource Discovery Systems Department allowed the team to more quickly develop complete and accurate datasets, and helped to shape the analysis conducted. This paper discusses the challenges of defining project scope, the process of forming methodology, and the challenges of collecting the data. It will also review how experts were able to contribute to each step of this process. Finally it will outline some initial findings of the analysis, and how this research was accomplished in a realistic time frame.