Promoting Public Library Sustainability through Data Mining: R and Excel
Tools
BRATT, Sarah and MOODLEY, Kusturie (2015) Promoting Public Library Sustainability through Data Mining: R and Excel. Paper presented at: IFLA WLIC 2015 - Cape Town, South Africa in Session 180 - Knowledge Management.
Bookmark or cite this item: https://library.ifla.org/id/eprint/1257
Language:
English (Original)
Available under licence Creative Commons Attribution.
Bookmark or cite this item: https://library.ifla.org/id/eprint/1257/1/180-bratt-en.pdf
Abstract
Promoting Public Library Sustainability through Data Mining: R and Excel
Information professionals have a vested interest in leveraging data to advocate for, justify, and support libraries’ political and financial activities. This research explores New York State public library data by analyzing the economic and employment disparities among New York State public libraries, affording steps toward a greater balance in terms of data accessibility and transparency. Acquiring and warehousing data is neither meaningful nor useful unless a workflow around data mining and analysis is established to ground assessment, recruiting, budgeting, decision-making, benchmarking, and community empowerment. The potential impacts of a dearth in best practices for quickly summarizing and interpreting public and enterprise data culminate not only in lost opportunities but also neglected resources. This report documents the workflow and insights from an analysis of the Institute of Museum and Library Services’ (IMLS) voluntary annual survey of public libraries in the United States from 2008-2011 using the statistical analysis tools R and MS Excel. The authors explored trends in New York State public libraries and found statistical correlations between library location, resources, and employee education with analysis steps that could be reproducible for libraries globally and nation-wide. Libraries may ostensibly seem behind the curve in understanding how to quickly assess the community. Yet librarians can leverage local data and international trends to better serve their respective communities, taking business insights and transforming them into public library ethos.Item Type: | Conference or Workshop Item (Paper) | |||||||||
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Conference details: | IFLA WLIC 2015 - Cape Town, South AfricaSession 180 - Path dependency change and sustainability – what can Knowledge Management do to make the future open? - Knowledge Management |
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Divisions: | Division 3 Library Services > Knowledge Management Section | |||||||||
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Uncontrolled Keywords: | Data mining, library & information science, R, knowledge management | |||||||||
Date Deposited: | 04 Aug 2015 12:54 | |||||||||
Last Modified: | 14 Aug 2017 08:56 | |||||||||
URI: | https://library.ifla.org/id/eprint/1257 |
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