An answer to the question, “How many databases?”

I’ve joked in the past about how to answer the question, “How many databases does your library have?” (comic at http://orgmonkey.net/?p=1325) It turns out it is quite difficult to define what a database is, depending on who is asking and what the purpose of the question is. We asked people around the library to define the term and they came up with some really good thoughts about what it means for a database to be marked as a database, for statistical purposes. For us it is an important distinction to make because we are annually requested to report numbers of databases, e-books, e-journals, and other e-formats as part of a collection of national library statistics. We want to get it right, and we want to be consistent from year to year.

Until now we had been making the determination annually. We would pull from our ILS a list of all of our e-resource records and decide which were databases and which were not. You can imagine that from year to year our decision would vary, depending on which version of the definition of database we were using at the moment. This process was time consuming, in addition to being inconsistent. The problem was perfect for a system-based solution, and here’s what we’ve come up with.

In our ILS, on the record for each of our e-resources, we have created a fixed field (re-purposed from an unused field we never activated when we implemented our e-resource management system six years ago) called Resource Count. When we create a new record we will give it one of the following codes (which relates to the meaning and definition):

We’ve gone through all of our e-resource records and coded them, so when we are next prompted to report, for example, how many databases we have we can query the system to return a number that includes d, c, e, and f. Nice.