ANLY482 AY2017-18 T2 Group 17 Findings
| Exploratory Data Analysis | Confirmatory Data Analysis |
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Treemap
Application of Treemap
The size of the rectangle corresponds to the number of books purchased and the colour intensity corresponds to the dollar amount spend on each genre. From the treemap, it is observed that Sociology and Political Science e-books have consumed a substantial proportion of the PDA funds. A large proportion of funds are being utilized by ‘Undergraduate Students’ followed by ‘Master Students’ across all genres.
Political Science and Sociology, the treemap shows that Sociology books are generally more expensive whereby a 12% increase in book quantity results in close to 50% increase in price spent. User groups were further broken down into their respective schools. From the breakdown, Social Sciences and Law students are seen to have utilized bulk of the resources of PDA programme. In the Sociology genre, there is a small group of students from Accountancy and Economics that also resulted in purchases of these books. A comparison of ‘DocI D’ is performed for these groups against the ‘Book Utilization rate’ data, where more than half of the books purchased belongs to 1 distinct user utilization only.
Mosaic Chart
Application of Mosaic Chart
An analysis on the usage distribution of e-books from JSTOR is performed. Users are group into difference user group based on their current status (Master, Undergraduate etc) and are further broken down into the respective years of admission.
From the Mosaic Chart, a total of 678 undergraduates were found to be accessing e-books from JSTOR in from May 2017 to December 2017. Across each admission year, the percentage of DocID purchase were below 15% with bulk of the purchases made from School of Social Sciences. The total price paid for e-book purchases by undergraduates stands at $6,473 with students from AY2017 spending the most, at $1,751. This shows that undergraduates utilized 64.7% of the PDA budget allocated to JSTOR, hence undergraduates should become our main area of concern when proposing recommendations to improve budget allocation.
Looking at other user groups, the following observations were noted;
1. 6 admin staff purchased e-books with a total price paid of $30
2. 9 faculty staff with a total price paid of $198
3. 8 PHD personnel purchased e-books with a total price of $73
4. library staff purchased e-books with a total of $194
5. 45 master students purchasing e-books at a total price of $651m with most students coming from the AY2017 batch
Interestingly, from the group of Master students, most purchases were made from students from the School of Information System.
Chapter Analysis
Chapter view analysis
With regards to the bar charts above, the count whereby there is no difference between vendor report and library proxy logs is removed (ie 0) to allow for a better representation.
When the difference between vendor report and the library proxy logs is plotted, there is a large discrepancy in the counting when the difference is at one. In total, there was a total of 117 instances where a difference of 1 occurred between the report and library proxy logs. Focusing on the purchased e-books specifically, the publisher, “Policy Press at the University of Bristol”, has the largest count of e-books having discrepancy among the publishers as shown above. Studying at the discrepancies counts between vendors’ report and library proxy logs, “Brookings Institution Press” had the e-books with discrepancies with the highest difference in chapter views of 9 chapters.
Chapter download analysis
A large discrepancy was observed for a difference of -1 chapter download between the report and library logs, where a total of 32 chapter downloads had the discrepancy. Most instances were from the Hong Kong University press with 6 chapter downloads for e-books which were purchased.
Looking at a macro perspective of PDF download differences, it was observed that “Princeton University Press” had the most discrepancies with the highest count of PDF download difference of positive 15.
E-book utilization
E-book utilization rate
Of the e-books purchased, 44.7% are solely utilized by 1 distinct user only. Hence, this confirms the concern whereby PDA model is not effective in assessing the needs of SMU communities. Hence, SMU Library should explore and experiment with other acquisition models to better quantify SMU communities’ needs.
