Cost Per User: Analyzing EZProxy Logs for Assessment

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 the interdisciplinary usage of an e‐resource, the depth of integration into a given program or course, and who will miss it if it is cancelled are generally relegated to the realm of anecdotal evidence. Researchers at Nevada State College have made 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. When matched with institutional data about those users, this data can answer questions 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. Ultimately, librarians can even discover if library users have higher GPAs or make better grades on research assignments. This paper will provide a summary of the work of the research team at Nevada State College, currently in the midst of their first year of EZProxy log analysis. About Nevada State College Nevada State College (NSC) was founded in 2002 and quickly became the fastest growing institution of higher education in the state of Nevada, and one of the fastest growing in the country. The College has a diverse student population of about 3,400 students. Over fifty percent of the students are from culturally diverse backgrounds. More than sixty percent of the students are first‐ generation college students, and about seventy‐ five percent are women (Nevada State College 2015). Serving a student population traditionally underserved by higher education is important to the mission and vision of Nevada State College. The College is constantly searching for solutions to help students succeed in their educational goals. One centerpiece of this effort is the use of data to drive decision‐making. The Office of Institutional Research makes use of several online data dashboards and a behind‐the‐scenes predictive analytics framework to identify indicators that a student may be struggling, and proactively recommend services that positively correlate with student success outcomes such as advising and tutoring. The Marydean Martin Library at Nevada State College initially became interested in EZProxy log analysis as a way of contributing to this predictive analytics framework by becoming a recommended service for student success. This paper will focus on the collection development aspects of the data. However, using the data to assess the library’s contribution to student success and to identify and address equity gaps in library use are also important goals of the project. Nevada State College’s Marydean Martin Library is the first digital library in the state of Nevada. There are no open book stacks in the library building, and the vast majority of resource use comes from the online collection encompassing more than 1.4 million e‐books and roughly 5 million scholarly articles. How the Data Is Collected EZProxy is OCLC’s authentication system for managing access to online library resources such as e‐books and electronic databases. Many academic librarians know it as the off‐campus authentication system, but at Nevada State College EZProxy mediates on‐ and off‐campus access. Librarians at Nevada State College made the choice to prompt for authentication on campus in order to capture all e‐resource use in the log files. EZProxy logs are an optional feature of EZProxy, which can be setup to track and save user activity (OCLC 2015). Most libraries do choose to collect some form of a log file for troubleshooting or security purposes, but often the data collected is brief and automatically deleted after thirty to sixty days. Copyright of this contribution remains in the name of the author(s). http://dx.doi.org/10.5703/1288284316291 End Users 410 At Nevada State College a comprehensive log file is collected, which includes, most notably, the unique user ID of the individual accessing library resources. The systems analyst in NSC’s Office of Information Technology Services (ITS) protects the raw data with encryption. On a monthly basis, she uses a PowerShell script that parses the data into a CSV format and sends it to NSC’s Office of Institutional Research (IR) using a scheduled job. In the IR office, the data is uploaded into a SQL database. SQL processes written by IR staff anonymize the data and match it with student data as well as usage data from other services on campus such as the writing center, advising, and tutoring. The library works with IR staff to create and maintain SQL update procedures that cleanup the log files, converting complex fields like the request URL into clear database and platform names whenever possible. Finally, the Director of Institutional Research visualizes the data in an online dashboard using Tableau. With this workflow, all of the matched data is anonymous and raw library use data is encrypted and protected. So for example, the number of library users with a GPA above 3.5 that accessed the Discovery search is evident from the online dashboard. However, that a named user with a GPA of 2.8 accessed WorldCat Discovery on October 5th is not stored anywhere in the dataset. For collection development purposes most of what librarians need to know about resource use is evident from the online dashboard. However, there is sometimes a need for deeper analysis such as the correlation between library use and GPA or the statistical significance of equity gaps in the usage of library resources by ethnicity or gender. When those needs arise, the quantitative Analyst from the Office of Institutional Research has been able to provide the library with statistical analyses based on the anonymous matched dataset. This project involves a significant collaborative effort across the institution. Some librarians outside of Nevada State College have noted that the barriers to such a partnership on their own campuses may be too high to explore EZProxy log analysis. However, there are still valuable insights to glean from proxy log analysis that do not require any matching with student data. To illustrate this, the first portion of this paper will refer to a dashboard created within the library Figure 1. Screenshot from Tableau dashboard of Nevada State College’s online resource use from January to September 2015.