The intent of the Blacklight Cost Index is to inform decision making for the 2020 CUL continuations review. The index is based on the following variables:

  1. Continuations review dataset created by Joanne Leary.
  2. Web analytics dataset pulled from the CUL web analytics system (Matomo). Visit data collected for the CUL Blacklight catalog and databases services. Time period studied: May 2019 - May 2020. There are 13 discrete months. Part of May 2019 and May 2020, and all of the months between.

The list of continuations under review is very long and includes various resource types. It will require a lot of effort to track down the vendor usage stats, match them to our list of titles, enter the data into a spreadsheet. Therefore, we would like to focus our staff resources and attention on the titles that require vendor usage data before we a decision about the title can be made. A secondary use for the index - baseline to drive questions around how patrons are and are not using the catalog to discover electronic resources.

Primary use for this the index is to identify titles that we can remove from the list of possible cancellations. This is possible because some titles in the continuations list are clearly used by patrons and cancelling them would definately have a negative impact. For example, Table 1 shows AP stylebook online: great value, using this metric. Cost is low and our catalog record was visited across 12 months, which means there is a community on campus that relies on it. Done. We should keep this one.

But I know that patrons don’t use the catalog to access title X

Then add title X to your list of titles that require vendor usage data before a decision can be made.

I would rather have an Excel file

Available upon request and in the CDA Box folder: https://cornell.app.box.com/folder/112859708714

I would rather have passkey usage data

Not sure how passkey usage data would be collected. Passkey is a simple javascript browser widget which prepends our ezproxy prefix to a url, on the client side. Where are the log files? They don’t exist. There are no log files to analyze. In contrast, all of our blacklight catalog and database traffic is logged to the CUL Matomo web analytics server.

By the way, in case you are curious how often our “passkey” pages are viewed, scroll through the raw usage data.


How is the bcostindex computed?

cost = cost of resource

blacklightvisits = total visits to record for title in Blacklight catalog and database services

months_w_use = number of months that the title was visited in Blacklight (number between 0 - 13)

monthsxvisits = months_w_use * blacklightvisits (assumption: visits across multiple months demonstrate need across the academic calendar)

bcostindex = cost / monthsxvisits