Building on a successful pilot study, this poster illustrates improved methodology and results from an EZProxy data project at Ryerson University. The purpose of our project is to fill a gap left by vendor usage reports, where some of the key questions remain unanswered: What resources are used? How often? And by who? The lack of reliable COUNTER data across all products and the absence of demographic information made it difficult to paint a complete picture of electronic resources usage across the institution. In order to fill this gap, the presenters collaborated with a computer science professor at Ryerson University on this project. In the pilot phase, we established relationships with campus partners including the Registrar’s Office and Campus Computing Services, and established a process to match IDs in the logs with demographic details about the user, while anonymizing the data to protect user privacy. Subsequent work has focused on the development of an in-house tool for analysis and data visualization.
This poster will describe our in-house development and outline some existing open source equivalents. Attendees will gain insights into the structure of the EZProxy data, how it can be used for evidence-based decision making. For institutions interested in embarking a similar project, they would benefit from our experience, both pros and cons. Vendors can deepen their understanding of the needs of academic library customers.
