Eva is responsible for gathering, manipulating and analyzing data to help answer questions asked by Library staff. She enjoys working with data to solve puzzles and is always striving for that moment when someone says “This is exactly what I need.” Her workload is largely driven by projects, which means that it ebbs and flows quite a bit. That said, Eva tends to be pretty busy in the Spring term, as that's when Liaison Librarians have more time to dedicate to retention reviews (projects to figure out which physical materials should be retained or weeded) which Eva pulls the information for.
Lately Eva’s been wrestling with Alma. She returned from maternity leave to a completely different system for accessing our data, and it’s quite the learning curve. In Alma some of the data connections just aren’t the same and the Ex Libris documentation can be unclear to say the least. It can be especially frustrating that the information you see exposed in Alma or Omni just doesn’t show up in the Analytics module for Alma, or it doesn’t show up in the way in which you’d expect. This is quite the contrast to Voyager (our old Library system) where Eva had direct access to the database making retrieval and manipulation easier.
Eva works closely with Sarah Martin in Circulation, Sue Arruda and Margaret Uhde in Collections Maintenance, on creating reports for their use. She also works closely with Jonathan Sutherland in Collection Development and Jenny Hirst in Digital Initiatives as they all work closely with Alma data in one way or another. She also enjoys participating in the Data Community of Practice – Eva gave a talk, The Sequel’s Even Better! Intro to the Language of Databases back in September 2018. You can check out the resulting blog post on LibDataDocs (you need to be connected to the VPN).
Eva is currently working on:
Eva’s just completed retention reviews for Architecture and Porter Reference. These retention reviews involve pulling the data for all the materials on the shelf (and on occasion their electronic counterparts), for particular areas and organizing them so that it’s easy for librarians to make collection decisions. Eva’s also been responding to ad hoc requests for circulation data, for example data for about the use of interlibrary loans.
How you can help Eva out
In order to provide the data needed, Eva really needs to know as much as possible about how you’re going to use it. If she gets more details about the bigger picture, she can pull and structure the data in a way that’s more helpful, and that avoid issues that can occur when people need to rearrange data on their own (where data might end up lost or misinterpreted because the file has been broken because a column has been hidden or deleted). For example, when preparing data for collection retention reviews, knowing how librarians are making decisions will help her create tables that are as helpful as possible in their original format.
Right now, Chris Gray in Digital Initiatives is helping Eva create a web form for retention decisions, that will hopefully help avoid the issues that can happen when multiple versions of a spreadsheet exist and important data (like standard identifiers) get removed. When these identifiers are removed it makes for a lot of work re-identifying the items in order for the on-the-floor removals and deletions to be made.
Something fun about Eva
Eva describes herself as someone who tries to stay happy and positive as much as possible, and says she’s always got stories to share. She has a 12 year old Bichon Frise, named Happy. She loves animals, exercise, travel and reading. She’s currently reading Atomic Habits by James Clear.
