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Ex Libris Knowledge Center

Using Summon Analytics to Make Strategic Decisions

A guide on using the analytics reports from Ex Libris' Summon to make strategic decisions for your library.

What is it?

This toolkit is a good resource if you are a confident user of the analytics platform, OBI, and looking for ways in which you might use the statistics and findings you have gathered to inform your library’s decision making.

Background Information

There is extensive documentation into accessing the analytics platform, creating and configuring reports on the Support Center:

·         Summon Analytics

Ex Libris Resources

This white paper aims to guide librarians to better understand how their peers are using quantitative and qualitative measures to evaluate the success of discovery services. See the heading Quantitative Analysis: Extracting Insight from Usage Data and references 24 – 31 for quantitative studies.

Community Resources

The following resources are from members of the Ex Libris User Groups and as such require membership of the ELUNA or IGeLU websites to access. We will update this toolkit with further relevant resources as we find them.

Silberger, Kathryn (2017) Gaining insights through Summon logs. In: ELUNA 2017 Annual Meeting, May 10-12, 2017, Schaumburg, Illinois.

Abstract: At Marist College we have used the Summon Usage module to provide insights about library usage to Librarians in Public Services and Collection Development. In additional to providing standard information about the number of searches and facets applied, the Summon Usage module can be used to glean information about such things as the impact of bibliographic instruction, interaction between LibGuides and Summon, and known item searches. All the examples given will use the tools native to the Usage module. It will explore interesting ways of using the Usage Module Reports such as the "Top Queries" search box, or drilling down into the "Referring Source" report to observe how different parts of the Library website interact with Summon. It will also discuss sharing this information with Reference and Instructional Librarians using an internal blog. Observations about the new Usage Module (Oracle Business Intelligence) will be shared as well.

Summoning statistics: the use of Google Analytics and OBI at the University of Leeds, IGeLU 2018

Abstract: Library staff at the University of Leeds have used Google Analytics to aid our understanding of how our students and academics use the Library website and discovery layer, with the aim of improving the user experience in both. Our new Library website was launched early in 2018 and its design was guided by what we had learned – the top searches were for the same databases, so we now have a list of the most popular databases linked from our homepage, and we now have pre-faceted searches throughout the website. We are now using Google Analytics and Summon’s OBI reporting tools to find out more about how people are using the discovery layer. We want to go beyond the “fun facts” of how many people are using which browser, to how they develop their searches through facets and refining search terms, and whether they find the resource they want.

Analytics Working Group

If you are an advanced user of analytics and would like to give feedback about the system, or how system usage is gathered, you may be interested in joining, contributing to, or following the reports of the analytics user groups.

IGeLU / ELUNA Analytics Working Group

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