Data-Driven Decision Making in Electronic Collection Development

As budgets have tightened, library administrators are looking for more data to help them in making difficult collections decisions. They then often provide these data to higher-level administrators outside the library. When collecting library data, several questions come to mind: Who collects the data? What kinds of data exist? When are data collected? Where does the responsibility of data collection reside? How are data collected and interpreted? In this article, the author aims to address all these questions so as to give the reader a sense of direction in how these data can be applied to drive collections and collection-development policy.