Our State of the Collection Report is an in-depth and personalized reporting feature provided to Basecamp and Summit Edelweiss+ Analytics libraries. (Details of the various subscription levels can be found here.)

This report will provide you with an objective assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of your library’s collections, identify specific areas to focus on, and enable you to track improvement over time. The audience for this report is just you and your library– no one else sees this information. 

The report can be accessed by adding it as a widget on your homepage. When the new report is run, it will arrive as a link to an interactive app that you can, if you wish, print as a PDF. You’ll be able to view previous reports, manage your recipients, and more.

The idea behind the State of the Collection Report is to provide a comprehensive look at your collection from the macro, market level all the way down to pinpointing individual titles. Since we’re comparing collection performance across the market place, this report uses industry-wide genre specifications, which are added to each title by the publishers. While each library system has their own unique collection codes, the book industry itself has a more consistent and universal classification system.  Segmenting by industry genre allows us to set realistic benchmarks for you to focus on, rather than comparing the performance of a genre like Art / Architecture to Comics & Graphic Novels, which is generally the more traditional approach… simply because no other tool really exists to see these market-wide performance benchmarks. You don’t have to do anything on your end to send us genre classification data.

This report measures your book collection only.

Each category is ‘graded’ according to 4 different measurements:

• Freshness: Using the Edelweiss+ Analytics Shelf Days analysis, an overall measure of the % of your own collections that is circulating well, or not.
• Relevance: Do you own the titles that are selling or circulating well everywhere else?
• Hit Rate: Measuring the effectiveness of your collection development, this measure shows whether or not newly published titles that you stocked were ever checked out.
• Turnover: How many times per year the average title circulated, a good overall measure for how well your collection performs, so to speak.

We have identified and implemented these four measures that, together, represent a solid approximation of a very healthy collection. Basically, managing towards the optimization of these four measures helps lead to a healthy collection, and a healthy collection makes a happy community.

Helpfully, the State of the Collection Report’s format allows you to track performance over time and provides a consistent way to communicate goals, issues, and victories with board members and directors, as well as staff members.