Online Program

Saturday, October 22
Knowledge
Community
Influence
Sat, Oct 22, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Salon 2
Speed Session 4

Using Data Science to Support University Libraries (303260)

Erin Craig, New College of Florida 
*Amelia Kallaher, New College of Florida 

Keywords: data science, library science, community, R, Shiny, university

New College of Florida recently wanted to understand how to purchase academic journal access based on student usage. This is an important decision for the school and the future of the library: making an uninformed choice can be an expensive error. To tackle this question, NCF's library team worked with its newly founded data science master's program. We began by collecting data: we needed to understand journal usage at the school, journal prices per article and subscription, and vendor prices. Unfortunately, our data sets were incomplete; we could not know every instance of journal usage, nor could we easily obtain pricing data from all journals and vendors. After collecting data, we hosted Shiny apps on AWS so that library administrators could explore, by journal and by vendor, their options and the associated costs. We now have a general tool to help university libraries decide how to allocate funds. In addition to supporting the New College library, this project built community within the school: New College gained both valuable data for the library and valuable consulting experience for its data science students.