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DataBank: YBP Consortia Data in Gobi

Consortial Comparison Reports

This report will give you numbers of titles, as opposed to a list of titles. For a list of titles, see Consortial Titles Comparisons.


You can compare your library to selected libraries on the number of titles received (through slip orders, etc.) on a particular subject or within a call number range, including or excluding publishers and/or e-books, and more. You can retrieve a graph or table. You can exclude treatments of subjects (e.g., books on AIDS but not Medical aspects). This sheet provides you with basic instructions; you will see on GOBI, however, that your choices are quite rich.

Note that to run any of these reports, you need to pick from the pull-down menu on CONSORTIUM (further down the page) if the library belongs to more than one.

A. See REPORTS tab

B. click on CONSORTIAL

C-a CONSORTIAL ACTIVITY:

· "Titles acquired by the consortium" This provides you with the number of titles, within the parameters you chose, that each library in the consortium has obtained.

DISPLAY AS:

· "Distribution by Title" As seen in the example below, this display option, when used with "Titles acquired by the consortium," reveals that 1 CIC library has purchased almost twice as many such materials as the next group of two libraries; 29 libraries bought 10 or fewer; and sixteen bought 18 or more. This example demonstrates that there is a library in this consortium for which this subject is strength relative to the other consortium members.

C-b CONSORTIAL ACTIVITY:

· "Titles acquired by the consortium" This provides you with the number of titles, within the parameters you choose, that each library in the consortium has obtained.

DISPLAY AS:

· "Distribution by Library" As seen in the example below, this analysis identifies libraries and compares the distribution of titles per institution.

 

C-c CONSORTIAL ACTIVITY:

· "All titles acquired or not" produces the total number of titles, within chosen parameters, that were available to acquire. You have the option to exclude your library.

DISPLAY AS:

· "Distribution by Library" is not a display option for "all titles". DISTRIBUTION BY TITLE will show you the total number of books available, as per the parameters you have chosen, the number of titles not acquired by any library in the consortium, and the number of titles acquired by X number of libraries. A partial view is shown below. There were 350 titles available, 93 went to zero libraries in the CIC and 1 library acquired 55. You could investigate further to find out what types of books were not acquired by, for example, checking off Content Levels or making other adjustments to the parameters.

 

VIEWING REPORTS

After executing the comparison with GO, you will see a link to the REPORTS ADMINISTRATION SCREEN. This will show you the status of the report (queued, running, etc.). It is also the screen from which you can VIEW a completed report.  You can get to that screen at any time by clicking the REPORTS tab, then ADMINISTRATION.

 

DATE PROFILED vs PUB DATE

(1) If your date parameters go back further than two years, the data might not be complete because YBP keeps shipment data for about 24 to 36 months.

(2) On the other hand, if your date parameters are very recent, the data could be distorted. Keep in mind that libraries need time to complete the selection process. There may be many titles that show as not acquired which will, however, be acquired in another month hence.

 

TITLES NOT ACQUIRED

Related to the above, it is quite possible to have high rates of titles-not-acquired and it is sometimes difficult to know what to make of the number. A report (in January 2010)on the number of books acquired by the CIC, within the Dewey range for Philosophy (100-129.9999), that had as a Date Profiled the first six months of last year (January-June, 2009) found that 52% (231) of the titles on offer (445) had not been acquired by any CIC library. The same report (also ran in January, 2010), but limited to a Pub Date of 2008 found that 57% (362) of the titles on offer (630) had not been acquired by any library in the CIC.  (Are CIC Philosophy collections weak? Are they dependent more on foreign language materials? Are many of the titles in the database on a popular or non-scholarly level? Are there many anthologies, books in Spanish, reprints? How does the CIC "not acquired" rate compare with that of CARLI?) There could be many good reasons for a high rate of un-acquired, all of which would be worth investigating.