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Assessment

LOUIS IPEDS Collection Statistics Toolkit

The purpose of this toolkit is to aid LOUIS member libraries in preparing their IPEDS submissions. This toolkit and instructions focus on getting data for the first two parts of the IPEDS survey, "Library Collections/Circulation" and "Interlibrary Loan Services." More information about the data included and instructions for use can be found by clicking the "Instructions" button on every page. Note that institutions may subscribe to resources not included in this toolkit independent of their LOUIS membership. Officially reported IPEDS data for previous years can be explored in the Louisiana Academic Library Data dashboard.



Data Notes

Time Period and Updates

Usage data and some collections will be updated twice a year: after February for the previous calendar year, and after August for the previous fiscal year. “E-Book, E-Media, E-Serial Circulation,” “Database Circulation,” “Interlibrary Loan,” and “Physical (aka Symphony)” pages will be updated through December 31 during the February refresh. Most collections data, including what is on the “E-Book, E-Media, E-Serial Collections” page and the “Database Collections” page, is only updated in the toolkit annually after August for the fiscal year release. Collections data on the “Physical (aka Symphony)” page is updated biannually, so you will see different totals there for a fiscal year and calendar year.

All data, including collections data, will be updated after August for the previous fiscal year.

Data Sources

Electronic Resources
Circulation (aka usage)**
  • Uses SUSHI Counter 5 connections for AMS, Credo, Duke, EBSCO, Gale, IEEE, JSTOR, Oxford, ProQuest, Readex [6], Sage
  • Uses manually downloaded equivalent reports from LearningExpress and LexisNexis
  • Databases uses Database/Platform COUNTER 5 reports (pr or dr), depending on what was available and if individual databases could be included, with metric_type Total_Item_Investigation applied to circulation totals (except for Credo, which uses Total_Item_Requests)
  • e-Books, e-serials, e-media use COUNTER 5 Title reports (tr) with metric_type changing depending on the data_type [3]:
    • e-books: unique title requests
    • e-media: total item requests
    • e-serials and other: unique item requests
  • The following LOUIS opt-in vendors are excluded due to unavailability of the data in the needed format. You will need to request this data from the vendor if you wish to include it in your circulation reporting.
    • AAAS
    • American Library Association
    • Center for Research Libraries
    • CAS
    • Chronicle of Higher Education
    • Clarivate
    • Elsevier
    • InfoBase
    • MLA
    • OCLC FirstSearch
    • SAGE Premier
    • Teton Data Systems
    • The Advocate
    • Third Iron
Collections (aka title counts)**

**Circulation statistics for electronic resources may include resources you subscribe to outside of LOUIS if they are from a vendor included here. Collections statistics for electronic resources only include LOUIS Core resources.

Workflows
  • Uses scripts that update on the first of each month and leave out shadowed items and locations
  • Member sites were asked which item types they use for each IPEDS field; results are pre-filtered here to reflect those choices
ILLiad
  • Uses ILLiad Borrowing - - Fill Rate Stats and Lending - Fill Rate Stats for each individual site

Footnotes

[1] EBSCO and LexisNexis Collection and Circulation counts automatically exclude Gold OA titles. It is not possible to include OA Access_Types for EBSCO or LexisNexis titles. Learn more about Gold Open Access from Open Library of Humanities.

[2] Data types have been pre-selected for SIRSI Workflows data based on institutional preferences.

[3] LexisNexis is not COUNTER compliant and instead uses "retrievals by source"

[4] Totals are calculated using the COUNTER 5 metric Total_Item_Investigations (LearningExpress PrepStep uses Sessions; OCLC FirstSearch uses Searches; Credo uses Total_Item_Requests).

[5] Note that IPEDS does not request inclusion of databases in Digital/Electronic Circulation counts. These numbers are included for your own data-keeping purposes.

[6] When the 2024 fiscal year toolkit was released fall 2024, Newsbank was in the midst of upgrading their usage statistics platform, and data was not available for most of 2024. The usage statistics platform is now finished, so Newsbank data through December 2024 is included in the toolkit.