Marmot and Prospector Circulation Statistics
25 July 2013
Introduction
Fifteen Marmot libraries joined Prospector in 2011. Since then we are interested in
circulation statistics compiled by two systems:
A. Prospector at the Alliance
B. Millennium at Marmot
Two categories of statistics are important:
1) Lend/Borrow Ratios—informing load-balancing parameters controlled by
Marmot and by the Alliance
2) Transits—the basis for Courier bills by the Colorado Library Consortium
(CLiC)
We have to account for a few problems:
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Report paradigms differ between Prospector and Millennium.
Report technology by Innovative is evolving from Web Management Reports,
to Reporter, then Decision Center.
Most Prospector “agencies” operate autonomous Millennium systems; but 16
agencies in Marmot, 3 in Flatirons, and 2 in CSU face unusual technical issues.
Multi-branch library districts on the Front Range run internal couriers—
transits between JeffCo branches, for example, should not be counted as CLiC
Courier traffic.
Most multi-branch libraries on the Western Slope use the CLiC Courier for indistrict deliveries—transits between GarCo branches should be counted as
CLiC Courier traffic.
A. Prospector
Prospector uses old “Web Management Reports” technology by Innovative. With an
agreeable browser and the right version of Java you can see this report:
http://prospector.coalliance.org:4444/olinkpatrep/report2//201207201306/
A1. Lend/Borrow Ratios according to Prospector
Settings for the report shown below are “Fulfillments” and “User-specified date
range.” You can see lend/borrow ratios for a 1-year period from July 2012 to June
2013. Adams State lent 2,911 items to other Prospector libraries, and borrowed
1,685 items, for a lend/borrow ratio of 1.73. To see other reports and date ranges,
click buttons in the left panel.
A2. Transits according to Prospector
Every “fulfillment” entailed one CLiC Courier trip from the lending site to the
borrowing site plus one trip home. Read down the TOTALS column to see that
Adams State as owning site sent 2,911 items. Read across the TOTALS row to see
that Adams as borrowing site sent 1,685 items back to owning libraries. The Courier
invoice for Adams should be based on the total of 2,911+1,685=4,596 transits.
There is one anomaly due to our consortium-within-a-consortium situation. It looks
like Adams State transferred 11 items to itself and ALD transferred 0 items to itself.
The 0 for ALD is logical. As for 11 loans from Adams to Adams, we think students
placed holds in Prospector, and Prospector converted them to local holds on Adams
holdings. Prospector is configured to disallow local holds for most Front Range
libraries, but Prospector allows local holds for Marmot libraries so that intraMarmot, inter-library loan requests can be filled. CLiC backs these counts out when
adding up transits for Courier invoice purposes.
B. Millennium at Marmot
The Millennium system at Marmot has been running Web Management Reports for
years. On September 1, 2011, a new Innovative product called “Reporter” began
harvesting stats from Marmot, and libraries began using this hosted web service in
2012. Reporter will be upgraded and renamed “Decision Center” in 2013. This new
technology is friendlier to different browsers, and reports can be exported directly
to Excel instead of pipe-delimited text that must be fiddled with in Excel.
Request a user id and password from Marmot, log in at: http://ermarmo.iii.com/iii/er-marmo/LoginPage.html, then select Circulation | Transaction
Location | Owning Location from these menus:
Choose two filters, Date Range 7/1/2012-6/30/2013 as above, and Transaction
Type Checkouts. Don’t use Circulations (Checkouts + Renewals) because renewals
involve no Courier traffic and have little value for lend/borrow ratios.
Take care when you look at this report after looking at the Prospector report above.
There are several key differences:
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Reporter “Transaction Locations” are like Prospector “borrowing sites”.
These are where items get checked out to patrons.
Reporter “Owning Locations” are like Prospector “lending sites”.
Transaction Locations are rows in Reporter, but columns in Prospector.
Owning Locations are columns instead of rows—disorienting, huh?
Rows and columns are sorted by counts instead of alphabetically, which
makes it easy to focus on the high rollers, but hard to find specific libraries.
B1. Lend/Borrow Ratios according to Millennium
There’s no lend/borrow ratio on this report so we have to do it the hard way:
1. Export to Excel.
2. Create a new row with formulas that divide owning location totals by
transaction location totals.
3. Exclude same-branch data—checkouts at MCPLD Central of items owned by
MCPLD Central are irrelevant to lend/borrow ratios or Courier traffic.
4. Exclude the Prospector column—we already counted this activity in the
Prospector report.
5. Exclude miscellaneous data that complicates the process.
See Appendix for the exact, tedious procedure to convert the raw spreadsheet into
what we need. Lend/borrow ratios are in row 5.
B2. Transits according to Millennium
In row 6 you can see that MCPLD Central sent 24,133 items to other libraries; Bud
Werner 30,238; Telluride 19,987; etc.
Raw:
Edited:
Appendix:
How to edit raw spreadsheet from Reporter
1. Delete columns CQ:CZ and rows 98:99. Fewer than 100 transactions involved
item records with sloppy Owning Location codes.
2. Delete all rows and columns labeled SD51, Plateau Valley, and ASD. These
school districts barely participate in Marmot system holds and not at all in
Prospector.
3. Insert a new row 5 for Lend/Borrow ratios.
4. To make the next steps easier, click on cell D7, select the Excel Window menu,
and Freeze Panes.
5. We don’t want to include items owned by MCPLD Central and checked out at
MCPLD Central, so delete the values in cells D7, E8, F9 etc.
6. Delete 3 columns labeled “Marmot Digital Library”, “Prospector”, and “TELL
WPL Vending MTN”, and 1 row labeled “Marmot Digital Library”.
7. Replace the value in cell C7 with the formula =SUM(D7:AW7), and copy that
formula down column C.
8. Replace the value in cell D6 with the formula =SUM(D7:D55), and copy that
formula across row 6.
9. Replace the value in cell C6 (3,860,816) with the formula =SUM(D6:AW6).
The grand total of transits we care about here is 338,816.
10. Now for the tedious part: the cells in row 5 need to be set one by one with a
formula. Cell D5 should contain =D6/C7. MCPLD Central items were checked
out 24,133 times by other libraries; and MCPLD Central checked out 59,606
items owned by other libraries; for a Lend/Borrow ratio of 0.40.