In July I told you about a project that my colleague and I were working on here, to develop a statistics dashboard for electronic resources usage. Our project has progressed to the point at which we are beginning the construction of the dashboard. To help guide our development we turned to the literature, to you practitioners out there, and to the open web to spark our imagination. We evaluated our available options and have decided to move forward using Google Sites as the home base for the dashboard. It is free and inherently customizable, the customization really being the visual thing that drove our decision. The other options included the use of some kind of template, and we frankly didn’t want the clutter that templates can bring to a project.
We presented our idea at the library’s management team meeting, where it was met with a curious optimism. We all know we need this kind of tool but at this point none of us are sure exactly what it will end up looking like or how it will be used. Future assessment of the tool will prove important for further development. The document we used during our meeting, which summarizes what we’ve learned so far is available to you at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1H_Srnc8uaRMPrl5n_97HpKLOVoBiGXxo_tB1OanCU5k/edit?usp=sharing.
I am eager to share the usage data we’re gathering with our librarians, and I hope the data will also be used by other library researchers and those interested in benchmarking. The data will be publicly available on the web (our license agreements do not have confidentiality clauses) and available under a Creative Commons 3.0 License.
Our goal is to have the construction complete by the end of the calendar year. I’ll post again about this when it is ready for you to review. Until then, wish us luck!
