Metridoc: Extensible Infrastructure for Metrics and Analytics

Session Type: Research/Project Update

Session Description:
This research update will feature assessment experts from the University of Pennsylvania and potential partners.

Metridoc, an extensible framework that supports assessment and analytics, was funded in 2011 by an IMLS grant. Metridoc provides tools for the collection of data from heterogeneous sources. Business intelligence gives managers greater insight into use and effectiveness of services. But data points from the great variety of systems employed – gate counts, ILS fund accounting, discovery tool use, Counter statistics, resource sharing systems, and others – are difficult to aggregate, do not share common or normal data definitions, and have valuable information encoded in difficult to understand formats. Metridoc seeks to improve business intelligence in libraries by providing tools to overcome these data challenges and inconsistencies by aggregating these many data in normalized and resolved form in a data repository that supports analysis and visualization tools.

Metridoc employs a plugin architecture that is accessible to library staff so that new or site specific data collectors or resolvers can be generated. A data collector gathers data from a specific system’s log files or in real time, and transforms that data into a data warehouse format. Currently, Metridoc data collection plugins have been created for Counter data from publishers, ILLiad and Relais resource sharing transactions, and fund accounting data. Additionally, during transformation, Metridoc can reach out to authoritative sources of data to resolve encoded information such as DOIs, User IDs, or account codes, into more useful bibliographic, demographic, or organizational values.

Session Leaders:
Tommy Barker, University of Pennsylvania
Joe Zucca, University of Pennsylvania

Session Notes:
View the community reporting Google doc for this session!