ACRL Statistics

Introduction

This page describes how to gather statistics from Aleph for the ACRL survey for eBooks and Digital/Electronic Media.

Question 40, Column 2 - Books [title count] – includes government documents (Digital/Electronic only)

In 2016, we did these using the data warehouse. For 2017, we found a way to do a nearly equivalent query using only Aleph.

In 2016, the reported answer for this question was 1,265,640

The question was:

Instructions (https://acrl.countingopinions.com/docs/acrl/2017Instructions_8_24_17.pdf)

40 Column B. Digital/Electronic Books (include government documents)

Report e-book titles owned or leased by the library if individual titles are cataloged and/or searchable through the library catalog or discovery system. Examples of discovery systems can be found at http://librarytechnology.org/discovery/.

E-books are digital documents (including those digitized by the library), licensed or not, where searchable text is prevalent, and which can be seen in analogy to a printed book (monograph). Include e-book titles in aggregated sets in which the library selected the aggregator even if not each individual e-book title.

Report the number at the administrative entity level; do not duplicate unit count for each branch.

Include government documents, locally digitized electronic books and electronic theses and dissertations. Include digital music scores if searchable by title through the library catalog or discovery system. Include open access (OA) titles if the individual titles are searchable through the library’s catalog or discovery system, except do not count e-book titles from HathiTrust, Center for Research Libraries, Internet Archive, and similar collections unless the library owns the digitized item and it is accessible under current copyright law.

Do not include titles in Demand-Driven Acquisition (DDA) or Patron-Driven Acquisition (PDA) collections until they have been purchased by the library.

Moreover:

• Count e-book titles regardless of the number of users.

• If possible, do not report duplicate titles even if the titles are in two or more databases or services. Report the titles based upon the cataloged bibliographic record rather than holdings records attached to the bibliographic record.

• E-book titles may be found through the library’s link resolver knowledge base in addition to the catalog or discovery system.

• A dissertation database such as ProQuest Dissertation & Theses Database is reported as a database.

To find the equivalent current results, run a CCL query in Aleph against UXU60, "(WSC=(FABDE ELEC) OR WSC=(FAUER ELEC)) AND WTP=BK NOT WST=SUPPRESSED" (do not add quotes). For more on CCL queries, see the following pages:

Common Command Language (CCL) Searching in Aleph

KBA-01363-T5W7:https://support.flvc.org/knowledge-base/kbdw/KBA-01363-T5W7

How do I use Common Command Language to search Aleph and the LINCCWeb Catalog

KBA-01353-C1L8: https://support.flvc.org/knowledge-base/kbdw/KBA-01353-C1L8

Introduction to the Aleph Client and Staff Searching - Harvard Wiki (PDF)

https://wiki.harvard.edu/confluence/download/attachments/194151133/train_stfs.pdf

The set count results will show more than 999,999 because that is the largest number that can be shown. However, the actual count will be higher and stored.

Next, save the set. Name it "FAEBKSH." The name is arbitrary, but it will help ensure the following steps work correctly.

This set gives us the result of all the Holdings records. We need to get the Bibs and refine by the type to just Books. To do this, you'll need to be able to run a manage-70 service. If you don't have the permissions to do this, please check with the Aleph permissions coordinator and your supervisor.

In the manage-70 form, you'll enter FAEBKSH in the *Input File field, FAEBKSB in the *Output File field, and HOL-TO-BIB in the *Convert Type field. Convert Library should be UXU01. Then press Submit.

This might take a while to run. Once it finishes, you can use a print-03 to view the format types of the bibs that were found.

In the print-03 form. Enter the file name FAEBKSB into *Input File, FAEBKSB-fmt.txt into *Output file. In *Field 1 + Indicator, enter "FMT". Then press submit. This, again, will take a while to run. When the file is complete, you should be able to retrieve it from UXU01/Scratch. Download the file. It will look like this:

Open the file in Excel and parse the Bib number from the format (there are many ways to do this. I would use =LEFT(A2,9) and =RIGHT(A2,2)). Then you can either develop a sumif formula or you can filter all the Bibs that aren't BK and delete them leaving only the BK bibs. The total count of BK bibs is the final value.