by Kent Anderson, CEO and Nicola Poser, Managing Director
RedLink is an independent startup providing software-as-a-service to libraries and academic publishers. Our goal is to solve challenges faced by both libraries and publishers, making content easier for readers to access, and analytics easier to use to inform decision-making. We believe we bring a unique perspective on how data can be used to help academic publishers, editors, readers, users, and libraries save time and streamline their collaborations. We strive to provide innovative solutions that cut across platforms and help to unite the scholarly ecosystem. Our mission and purpose is to help our customers “see what they’re missing.”
RedLink’s foundational product for academic libraries is Library Dashboard, a purpose-built analytics tools to help libraries access, analyze, and visualize usage data for their journals, eBooks, and databases.
While integrated library and e-resources management systems are invaluable for setting up and managing e-resource collections, research about librarians’ needs indicate a clear gap when it comes to supporting renewal decisions and providing usage data. This is the gap we believe Library Dashboard addresses.
In our conversations with libraries we have heard how much time it takes to gather usage statistics. While it tends to vary depending on staff, resources, and reporting cadence, libraries share that it is often burdensome and distracting. Library Dashboard works to alleviate these burdens and distractions by automatically harvesting, aggregating, and normalizing usage data across data sources. By providing the COUNTER data all in one place, with analytics and data visualization tools, Library Dashboard makes it easier to use more frequently and focus on what it means.
In addition to reviewing usage data annually to make tactical renewal decisions, on-demand access to updated data in an easy-to-use dashboard enables libraries to use the data on an ongoing basis to address more strategic questions such as collection development (“are there any areas of research that don’t seem to be met by current resources?”), library promotion (“are the resources that not being used as expected?”), and user support (“should more training be provided for some resources?”).
Understanding how usage across your portfolio is changing, or how usage is distributed across your collection, can help drive collection decisions. With Library Dashboard, you can quickly get an overview, and then drill down to the details. The Dashboard provides powerful analytics and visualization tools, and nearly all of the tables, charts, and graphs can be exported as an image, or as an Excel file with the underlying data. One goal of the Dashboard is to easily enable sharing the data with additional stakeholders.
With faceted analysis, you can view denials and/or full text usage for journals, eBooks, and databases by provider, bundle, and discipline, as well as rate of change over time (looking only at positive growth, for example, or the 10% highest declining usage). Discipline-level analytics are powered by RedLink’s proprietary taxonomy, which was developed by experts at the San Jose State University’s iSchool in partnership with RedLink.
Some of the additional analytics that are easy to do with the Dashboard include:
Since launching the Dashboard, we have released several enhancements, which are automatically pushed out to all subscribing institutions. Several of these enhancements have been in response to user request, including greater ability to download the underlying data.
By harvesting the data for you and providing on-demand access to the Dashboard, and offering an easy-to-implement software tool requiring minimal IT support with a simple flat subscription model, we hope that you will able to take advantage of the analytics and visualizations to easily “see what you’re missing.”
Contact:
Nicola Poser
Managing Director
Redlink, Inc.