Toshiro Minami

Data Analysis Methods for Library Marketing

Our society is rapidly changing to information society, where the needs and requests of the people on information access are different widely from person to person. Librarys mission is to provide its users, or patrons, with the most appropriate information. Libraries have to know the profiles of their patrons, in order to achieve such a role. The aim of library marketing is to develop methods based on the library data, such as circulation records, book catalogs, book-usage data, and others. In this paper we discuss the methodology and imporatnce of library marketing at the beginning. Then we demonstrate its usefulness through some examples of analysis methods applied to the circulation records in Kyushu University and Guacheon Library, and some implication that obtained as the results of these methods. Our research is a big beginning towards the future when library marketing is an unavoidable tool.

RFID tag based library marketing for improving patron services

In this paper, we deal with a method of utilizing RFID tags attached on books and extract tips that are useful for improving library services to their patrons. RFID is an AIDC (Automatic Identification and Data Capture) technology, with which we can automatically collect data how library materials are used and how often. By analyzing such data we are able to acquire knowledge that helps the librarians with better performing their jobs such as which books to collect, how to help their patrons, and so on. We will call such method “in-the-library marketing,” because the data deal with how library materials are used by patrons in the library. It is more effective if we also add the data captured from out-of-the-library and integrate them for whole “library marketing.” Furthermore, we also illustrate architecture for protecting the patron-related privacy data from leakage, which is another important issue for library marketing.

A Library Marketing System for Decision Making

The major aim of library marketing system is to help the library and its patrons with providing useful information and various kinds of knowledge, which are extracted from the data that are collected by the library system. In this paper we lay heavy stress on the use of such information and knowledge for assisting decision making of the library and of its patrons. Furthermore our main concern is to investigate how much we can utilize the usage data of materials obtained in the intelligent bookshelves (IBSs), i.e. the bookshelves equipped with RFID antennas and their reader/writer controllers (R/Ws). In this paper we propose some analysis methods of these usage data, alone and combining with other library data, and demonstrate their potential importance for library marketing.

Seat usage data analysis and its application for library marketing

Due to the progress of information and communication technology, our society is changing very quickly. Along with this, peoples requirements to information are not only changing vigorously but also have a huge variety in their forms. As a result it becomes more and more difficult for the libraries to provide their patrons with appropriate information services. In this paper, we demonstrate the usefulness of the concept of library marketing through some examples; especially with some analysis methods for seat-usage, or seat-occupation, data in library. We investigate what seats are more preferred than others and try to deduce tips for better seat arrangement, combination of different types of seats, etc. Even though our research is in a very early stage so that we could not infer that good suggestions to better seat arrangements, we believe in its importance and it would propose the best solution in seat design in the future.

Library services as multi agent system

The major aim of this paper is to propose a multi-agent model that represents the natural structure of library services that are carried out in collaboration with libraries, interaction between libraries and collaboration and their patrons, collaboration among patrons, and so on. Another aim is to demonstrate its usefulness in terms of flexibility and scalability. For example, in order to achieve their missions libraries provide the service called ILL (Interlibrary loan), with which a patron, or a user, can borrow books that belong to other libraries. Such a collaborative service is very common to current libraries. In the future, it would be extended to other types of collaborative services such as collaborative online referencing, collaborative community formation and information sharing, and so on. The library system organized as a multi-agent system should be very useful in order to provide such services in a flexible and scalable framework.

Putting old data into new system: Web-based catalog card image searching

This paper proposes a new approach to solve the data inputting bottleneck problem for library catalog data, or metadata. The data have been provided by paper cards arranged in wooden boxes. A lot of efforts have been taken to digitize them in order to put these data to be machine-readable. However, despite such efforts, only a small amount of data has been digitized so far because the inputting is done manually. We solve this problem by using the catalog card images digitized by high-speed scanners. This approach has advantages such as: (1) we can deal with the electronic catalog data with remarkably reduced time and cost; (2) it enables the seamless integration of the image-based and keyword-based searches; and (3) it boosts up the process of inputting of the catalog data itself.

Toward Learning Support for Decision Making: Utilization of Library and Lecture Data

Supporting students’ learning is very important for a university as an educational organization. It is highly expected to give supports individually according to each student’s situation such as his or her knowledge, study skills, learning history, preferences, etc. Due to the development of information and communications technology including Web and Internet, it becomes popular and easy to automatically collect data, and to analyze them and extract knowledge and information about the users’ behavior and preferences. For example, the net-companies, such as the ones proving e-commerce services, utilize the customers’ behavior data for extracting marketing information. Quite a lot of universities that provide institutional repository (IR) service try to analyze the log data in order to understand and evaluate what the service means for them. The data relating to library services are also useful for library marketing, which aims to provide better user, or patron, services and to improve management. In this paper, we discuss the importance of data analysis of the data relating to lecture data of university classes together with library data.

An Attempt on Effort-Achievement Analysis of Lecture Data for Effective Teaching

The eventual goal of the study in this paper is to find inspiring tips for effective teaching by analyzing lecture data. As a case study, we take a course in a junior college and investigate the relations between effort and achievement of the students. We take two types of data for measuring effort of students; attendance and homework. The former one is for representing the students’ “superficial” efforts and the latter for representing the students’ “intentional” efforts. We take the term-end examination score for measuring the student’s achievement. In this paper, we first try to find what kind of efforts the students put in terms of effort by comparing the attendance and the homework data. Then we investigate the relations between the efforts and achievement and try to find if the efforts of students really give good amount of influence to their achievements. As a result of the analysis we have found even with some amount of efforts, students learn just a little bit in achievement in terms of practically applicable skills. We need further investigation in order to give more clear influencing factor in effort-achievement analysis of lecture data.

Potentials of Circulation Data Analysis for Library Marketing: A Case Study in a University Library

Marketing is an essential tool for customer relation management of companies. Contrastingly, non-profit organizations like libraries have not been considered it very useful. However, due to the progress of the information society, our society becomes too complex to capture the patrons’s needs for them in the way they have been using so far. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the importance and usefulness of marketing by presenting some analysis methods of circulation data of a university library and showing what can get about the patrons’ behavior. The analysis methods presented in this paper are not only some statistical ones but also non-statistical ones, such as the one for analyzing patron’s borrow-return behavior pattern; in other words patron profile. Even though library marketing is in its very early stage, it has a big potential for aiding library management. We have to accumulate the case studies and establish useful marketing methodologies.

Bibliometric Search with Focused Citation Ratios

A survey of related work is an important task for every researcher, and databases of scientific articles are indispensable for this task. This paper proposes a new visualization method for search results and demonstrates a system that implements this method. Given a query, the system returns a list of articles and displays a time series of citation counts (CCs) for each article. The novelty of the visualization is in its use of CC for the horizontal axis and focused CC (FCC) for the vertical axis. A scatter plot of the article reveals how the article was evaluated.