Join us for WorldShare Reports office hours, 20 October 2022

[jonesa]

Hi everyone,

We hope you’ll join us for our October office hours session. This is your chance to ask questions about standard reports and receive guidance on custom reports.

Date: 20 October 2022

Time: 11:00am - 12:00pm EDT (UTC -4)

Register Now

As always, we ask that you reply to this discussion thread with any how-to questions about Report Designer that you’d like us to cover during the session.

Thank you!

[jonesa-test]

Hello,

We need simple, adaptable reports to show items with low circulation to help with weeding print stock. We're thinking of circulation item statistics, collection evaluation and maybe the weekly ftp item report. Two questions have arisen.

1) What does the object 'Item available processed date' in the Circulation Item Status universe represent?

We were hoping it may provide an indication of when the item passed through acquisitions, without requiring a separate universe join. It contained no values for the stock in the test weeding report (all 01/01/0001). Looking at more items we see there is only a value for items currently in 'In Processing' state. For these the date given starts from the year 2219.

2) We'd quite like to try using Collection Evaluation, with a filter on 'circulated # times in lifetime', to tell us which stock is not being circulated. We like the idea of this because any staff member could produce a custom report for their subject on demand in an intuitive way. It is a title level report but shows multiple rows for some oclc numbers. I'm sure this has been discussed in the past but I can't remember, why is this?

[jonesa-test]

Hello, re post above I've tried comparing the output from a collection evaluation report with data from analytics. It hasn't clarified what I'm looking at though!

First I ran a collection evaluation report with these filters.

• Add location parameter: Filtered by our main site and our one week and 24 hour shelving location.
• Circulated # times in lifetime: Filtered to less than 1
• Subject Medicine/Human Anatomy

This produced a list of 34 unique ocns, some with multiple rows.

Then I went to analytics to see if I could get some comparison data.

Query 1 in the LHR Item Detail Universe has one filter:

• Conspectus Category > In List > Human Anatomy

I believe this is the correct level matching the filter applied above, it looks like conspectus is division/category/subject.

Query 2 is the Circulation Item Status Universe and query setup is:

• Item branch name > [main branch]
• Permanent shelving location > In List > [one week and 24 hour locations]
• Item OCLC number > In List > OCLC Number from Query 1

So this outputs all the items in that conspectus category and result objects showing are item barcode, item branch name, item call number, item oclc number, item permanent shelving location, item title, Item Issued Count.

Playing with this in Excel and this data contains all the ocns from the collection evaluation report. However, it contains 70 unique ocns for which all items have a 0 issue count. So almost twice as many as the conspectus and I was expecting the data to match.

[jonesa]

Thanks for this! Your question got me really curious, partly because we might have to do something similar in the near future. To prepare for the Office Hours, I started doing a test custom report similar to yours. It turns out that Human Anatomy is a Category for more than one Division (at least for the titles we hold). If you try adding Division as a filter or input control, are your results in your custom report closer to Collection Evaluation?

In my custom report, I added Division as a report object and then used an input control:

I'll be interested to hear what Andy advises.

Cheers!

[jonesa-test]

Thanks, there were Preclinical science division results in the analytics. I'll repeat my sums without it. (Fingers crossed.)

I have also tried to see how these two methods compare to the ftp weekly item inventory reports. However, as these only have item call numbers on it is not really comparable to anything in collection evaluation. I suspect the fact we use dewey rather than LCSH will make conspectus categories even more different from our local call number ranges and so not terribly useful at a granular level.