{"id":5347,"date":"2024-07-31T14:12:23","date_gmt":"2024-07-31T14:12:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.oclc.org\/next\/?p=5347"},"modified":"2024-07-31T14:12:23","modified_gmt":"2024-07-31T14:12:23","slug":"insights-for-collections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.oclc.org\/next\/insights-for-collections\/","title":{"rendered":"From data to action: Leveraging insights to make more informed collection decisions"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u201cHow many books are there on Islamic law?\u201d<\/p>\n

This was the deceptively simple question posed by a colleague while brainstorming the potential scope of a digitization project on Islamic legal history. For non-librarians, it might seem like something one could just \u201clook up.\u201d But as you and I know, that kind of analysis only begins with a simple question and branches out into many more complex issues of data analysis, accounting for duplicate titles, different editions, and multiple languages, etc.<\/p>\n

But I decided to give it a go and survey a selected number of libraries in North America using the tool Choreo Insights. I published the in-depth results of my findings in another post on the Islamic Law Blog<\/a>, but today wanted to talk more about the process.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Defining the whole, exploring specifics<\/h2>\n

My source is Choreo Insights<\/a>, an analytics tool developed by OCLC for collection development, shared print, and other management purposes. It allows us to analyze and compare library collections by accessing data directly from WorldCat.<\/p>\n

When first starting to use the tool, I wanted to work toward that \u201cbig number.\u201d Something close to the total of all Islamic law texts in library collections, or at least a place to start. So, I chose 14 large North American libraries with holdings in WorldCat (listed here by number of holdings that matched my search): Harvard, Library of Congress, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, NYU, UC Berkeley, University of Michigan, Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, University of Chicago, Cornell, and McGill.<\/p>\n

I searched for \u201cIslamic Law\u201d in the FAST heading filter\u2014and when I searched across all these libraries I returned a set of 46,032 distinct title editions.<\/p>\n

Now, this is obviously not a complete answer to the original question. But it gives us a reasonable \u201ccollective collection<\/a>\u201d to then perform deeper, specific explorations.<\/p>\n

Different lenses on the collective collection<\/h2>\n

Once I had my initial list, I could start to do some research based on what\u2019s important to my discipline. And also, what I\u2019m personally curious about. So, I dove into:<\/p>\n