Analyzing Usage: V-insight at Windesheim
With over 18.000 students, Windesheim is one of the largest institutions of higher education in the Netherlands. The university's media center offers students and faculty access to a large collection of books, journals, DVDs and CDs. To gain insight into the usage of its collections, the media center implemented V-insight, Infor's statistical analysis portal, at the end of 2008. Says Peter van Helsdingen, manager at the media center: “V-insight allows us to analyze and view data in a variety of ways. The system gets data out of our database and conveniently provides and presents our management information in various graphs.”
For the librarians of Windesheim V-insight is particularly useful when comparing data over time. Van Helsdingen: “V-insight presents trends in a graph. You can see for example how many loans you had in a recent quarter and compare the number to the last 4 years. You can do the same of course for the number of reservations or even assess the growth - or decline - of the number of titles in any given category. The data gives us a better handle on overall usage of our collection and helps us improve our collection development quite a bit.”
Besides obtaining the data, the media center also found it easy to use the information in quarterly reports. Van Helsdingen: “V-insight has various export options that allow us to use the information in different formats. For our quarterly report we include detailed information about the number of titles in our collections organized by category and material type. We also present the number of reservations and renewals. The software has been very beneficial in terms of showing trends and demonstrating the depth of our operations.”
For more information about Windesheim visit: www.windesheim.nl.
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