Collection metrics - what's the problem here?
When you go through the selection management process, it’s vital to be able to critically evaluate the value of your content if you are to make the right decisions about which subscriptions are worth adding to or keeping in your collection. At a time when budgets are increasingly being stretched, it’s more important than ever to apply careful measurement to ensure you’re only subscribing to content that pulls its weight. To help you ascertain the value of your own content, we’ve put together a handy checklist to help you understand which metrics matter when it comes to evaluating your content.
How our checklist can help your library
Effective selection management decisions don’t always revolve around a straightforward assessment of what your most popular content is; the considerations are often more complex, and an effective decision must take into account a range of factors backed up by quantitative data. We understand how complex this process of content evaluation can be, so we’ve put together our checklist to help clarify your thought processes and provide a framework for your selection management workflow. In particular, we want our checklist to help you:
- Build up a clear picture of the ROI of your content
- Develop a more critical approach to underperforming content, based on concrete evidence
- Start looking at the bigger picture by assessing what your content is worth to your researchers and to the wider academic community
- Learn to spot extra details that you may not have thought about or noticed before
- Justify budget spend against the rising cost of materials
- Decide which of your content subscriptions should be renewed, which should be cancelled and which need further promotion or purchasing in a different format
- Understand the complexity of selection management and see how effective decisions can help your budget go further
Ultimately, by guiding you through these important considerations, referring to our checklist will help you make better decisions on which content deserves to be in your collection.
What you’ll find on the checklist
Your selection management metrics checklist includes a detailed breakdown of each of the metrics, including what it means and why you need to look at it. We’ve designed our checklist so that you can work through it systematically and tick off each item as and when you’ve evaluated the metric, but it’s not meant to be rigorously applied in all cases; you can pick the metrics you feel are relevant to you and apply them as you feel appropriate. By tailoring it to your own needs, we hope that our handy checklist can give some structure to your selection management workflow and reassure you that you haven’t overlooked anything important in the decision-making process.
If you’d like to get your hands on this indispensable selection management metrics checklist, click below to sign up for a copy today. You may also be interested in our selection management metrics infographic, and our selection management whitepaper provides even more detail should you need it.
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