Transforming Data into Services: Delivering the Next Generation of User-Oriented Collections and Services

Lynn Silipigni Connaway, Timothy Dickey, Edward O'Neill, Brian Lavoie, Scott Nicholson and Julia Gammon

ASIS&T 2008 Annual Meeting (AM08 2008)
Columbus, Ohio, October 24-29, 2008

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Summary

For decades, the corporate sector has exploited technological advances to better market and deliver products and services to customers via the techniques of data mining. The technique was not widely used in libraries. However, with the current emphasis on evidence-based decision making, libraries are beginning to utilize their system- and user- generated data. Data mining usually involves a significant endeavor to extract embedded and potentially useful information from large undiscovered data sets (Mitra & Acharya 2003; Hand, Mannila & Smyth, 2001; Frawley, Piatetsky-Shapiro, & Matheus 1992; Piatetsky-Shapiro & Frawley 1991).

These data mining techniques are being used by librarians to improve both internal decision-making and external user services by extracting information from operational datasets of both bibliographic and user data. OCLC Programs and Research has taken advantage of the WorldCat database, which includes more than 95 million bibliographic records and 1.2 billion holdings records, as well as data provided by other major library systems and consortia.This panel will report on several prototypes and research projects (http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/mining/) involving both data mining and data visualization, that can be utilized for the development of user services.

This panel will culminate in a response from Scott Nicholson, a well-known researcher in data mining and bibliomining. It is anticipated that the audience will be library practitioners and researchers interested in data mining and the development of evidence-based user services who will interact in a discussion and question and answer session led by the moderator.

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