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Academic libraries have recently been subjected to continuous budget reductions, mainly due to the increasing costs of information and the global economic crisis. As the primary purpose of an academic library is to provide well-balanced collections and a wide range of services to support education and research, an efficient use and allocation of limited resources is vital. However, allocating resources such as money, staff, time, and infrastructure between the library collection and services represents a challenge due to the multitude of data sources required to consult during a decision-making process. Academic libraries are accustomed to keeping voluminous statistics on their collection and services; however these data are not fully used for decision-making processes due to the lack of an efficient structure for grouping this information. The authors in a previous study state that prior to decision making, data must be collected based on a holistic approach that incorporates all of the key elements that may influence a decision. It is in this sense that to holistically assess libraries, an approach combining a theoretical framework with several measurement tools is proposed in that study. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to document early experiences and lessons learned in implementing the holistic approach in an academic library in Belgium. To do so, the academic library is evaluated in two dimensions. The first dimension analyzes the library system and its collection, whereas the second dimension analyzes the perspective of both the user and the internal stakeholders. During the initial implementation stages, the proposed approach proved to be valuable to ensure a complete view of the library collection and services. There are, however, important considerations to be borne in mind such as the time required to implement the complete approach, as well as the need of a system to integrate the collected information. no isbn ispartof: pages:1-9 ispartof: Proceedings of IATUL Conferences pages:1-9 ispartof: 34th Annual IATUL Conference location:Cape Town, South Africa date:14 Apr - 18 Apr 2013 status: published

Libraries since their inception 4000 years ago have been in a process of constant change. Although, changes were in slow motion for centuries, in the last decades, academic libraries have been continuously striving to adapt their services to the ever-changing user needs of students and academic staff. In addition, e-content revolution, technological advances, and ever-shrinking budgets have obliged libraries to efficiently allocate their limited resources among collection and services. Unfortunately, this resource allocation is a complex process due to the diversity of data sources and formats required to be analyzed prior to decision-making, as well as the lack of efficient integration methods. The main purpose of this study is to develop an integrated model that supports libraries in making optimal budgeting and resource allocation decisions among their services and collection by means of a holistic analysis. To this end, a combination of several methodologies and structured approaches is conducted. Firstly, a holistic structure and the required toolset to holistically assess academic libraries are proposed to collect and organize the data from an economic point of view. A four-pronged theoretical framework is used in which the library system and collection are analyzed from the perspective of users and internal stakeholders. The first quadrant corresponds to the internal perspective of the library system that is to analyze the library performance, and costs incurred and resources consumed by library services. The second quadrant evaluates the external perspective of the library system; user’s perception about services quality is judged in this quadrant. The third quadrant analyses the external perspective of the library collection that is to evaluate the impact of the current library collection on its users. Eventually, the fourth quadrant evaluates the internal perspective of the library collection; the usage patterns followed to manipulate the library collection are analyzed. With a complete framework for data collection, these data coming from multiple sources and therefore with different formats, need to be integrated and stored in an adequate scheme for decision support. A data warehousing approach is secondly designed and implemented to integrate, process, and store the holistic-based collected data. Ultimately, strategic data stored in the data warehouse are analyzed and implemented for different purposes including the following: 1) Data visualization and reporting is proposed to allow library managers to publish library indicators in a simple and quick manner by using online reporting tools. 2) Sophisticated data analysis is recommended through the use of data mining tools; three data mining techniques are examined in this research study: regression, clustering and classification. These data mining techniques have been applied to the case study in the following manner: predicting the future investment in library development; finding clusters of users that share common interests and similar profiles, but belong to different faculties; and predicting library factors that affect student academic performance by analyzing possible correlations of library usage and academic performance. 3) Input for optimization models, early experiences of developing an optimal resource allocation model to distribute resources among the different processes of a library system are documented in this study. Specifically, the problem of allocating funds for digital collection among divisions of an academic library is addressed. An optimization model for the problem is defined with the objective of maximizing the usage of the digital collection over-all library divisions subject to a single collection budget. By proposing this holistic approach, the research study contributes to knowledge by providing an integrated solution to assist library managers to make economic decisions based on an “as realistic as possible” perspective of the library situation. Doctoral in Systems Engineering Leuven