1

Hot Mess to Hot Mama:

Making Over the SFX Most Popular Journals Report

Melissa Platkowski

Coordinator of Library Technology

University of Wisconsin – Green Bay

platkowm@uwgb.edu

2

About UW-Green Bay

Four-year campus with a few graduate programs

Part of the University of Wisconsin System, which is made of 13 four-year campuses and 14 two-year campuses.

About 6,000 students 16 permanent library staff

3

What is the Most Popular Journals Report?

Report #19 out of the SFX Statistics Queries

4

What does it count?

For all the journals used in a given time period, this report counts:

Requests: Number of times a title is called up on an SFX menu

Clickthroughs: Number of times a link on the SFX menu for that title is clicked

5

Some very useful data…

Usage is independent of:

Target Publisher

Platform

6

…but a hot mess!

It comes out of SFX looking like this:

7

…but a hot mess!

It is a BEAST.CC Image courtesy of clry2 (Chris Yiu) on Flicker

8

…but a hot mess!It is unique every month.

It lists only journals with at least one request or clickthrough

Titles are added, deleted, and changed every month

9

…but a hot mess!

If a journal title starts with the word “The”, it is on the list under “T”.

There are hundreds of these.

10

…but a hot mess!

Some Weird Stuff shows up on it.

11

The First Spruce-Up Text-tab delimited file converted to Excel. Fixed alphabetical listing (most of the time,

but missed some!) Printed and put into binders.

12

No Celebrity Stylists

My “Geekiness Ranking” is not very high, so I had to work with tools I knew. (No scripts!)

www.innergeek.us/geek.html

13

The Extreme MakeoverModifying the Most Popular Journals report:

To pull out the “dead end” no-object-ID data, you need the Object ID on the report.

It’s a simple tweak to the settings for the report (ask Ex Libris tech support), but you do need to muck around in Unix and…

break your symbolic link.

(Scary, but worth it.)

14

Breaking a link = too scary? You can also use the Lookup tool in SFX admin

to give you the object ID’s for the titles on your report.

Use this to retroactively add the Object ID to past reports.

I didn’t want to do this every month.

15

The “Facial” for Your Data:

Clean up the spreadsheet:

Weed out the items with no Object ID

Delete the query parameter data at the end of the report

Correct the journal titles that begin with “A” or “The” and re-sort by title

16

Excel Magic: Pivot Tables

What’s a pivot table?

Match Point

January

February

March

Pretty Data!

17

Excel Magic: Pivot Tables

So you give Excel the data…

18

One Hot Mama!

And it cheerfully provides this…

…and you just use the Find feature in Excel to search by title or ISSN!

19

The Big Reveal

Pretty Data!

20

Be a Stats Rock Star!

Give good data, quickly!

Low maintenance!

Collection Management will love you!

No more Big Fat Binders!

21

Personality Quirks

Some things just don’t quite work in the pivot table:

Title variations that don’t blend

Titles with no ISSN

22

Guide & Questions

I have written a step-by-step guide to making over the Most Popular Journals report, from cleaning up the Excel files to creating the pivot tables. I will post them to EL Commons with my notes and presentation after the conference.

Questions?

platkowm@uwgb.edu