Cost per use has long been a staple of collection development decision making for electronic resources, but what of the users behind those retrieval and search counts? Questions about how interdisciplinary usage of a database is, how deeply integrated it is into a given program or course, and who will miss it if it is cancelled are generally relegated to the realm of anecdotal evidence. In this session a librarian from Nevada State College will present on efforts to remedy this gap in knowledge by analyzing EZProxy logs, which can be set up to capture unique user identifiers at the point of authentication into library electronic resources. This data can be matched with institutional data about those users to run analyses such as cost per user, percent of users within the institution as a whole or a specific department, and frequency and depth of use for the average user. They can also be matched with other institutional data factors to determine things like if library users have higher GPAs or make better grades on research assignments. In this session attendees will learn about the types of questions that can be answered with EZProxy log analysis. Assumptions about electronic resource use will be questioned, followed by real time interaction with Nevada State College’s library use dashboard to discover the answers from the Library’s first year of data collection. http://tabsoft.co/1EqMsBy
