Best Practices for ACRL/IPEDS/ATS Surveys
All PALNI member libraries respond to the required annual IPEDS Academic Libraries survey, and most respond to the annual ACRL Academic Library Trends and Statistics survey. To ensure accurate reporting, and consistency among libraries, the PALNI Analytics Team provides the following recommendations of Best Practices when gathering data for the ACRL survey. These recommendations are based on communication with ACRL support staff.
Action Items for Libraries:
PALNI libraries are asked to submit the ACRL survey. If your library does not wish to respond to the full survey, we ask you to submit the data values that are already required for IPEDS in a partial survey.
Staffing and Wages
If your library does not wish to report salaries and wages for ALL staff categories, in order to maintain confidentiality, we recommend that you do not report salaries and wages to ACRL. Provide a comment/note for fields left blank.
Because ACRL auto-calculates salary and wage totals, reporting only some categories (for example, you report wages for student assistants but not for your solo librarian) will result in inaccurate data in the totals and will impact Benchmark dashboards as well as other key metrics and performance ratio calculations.
Expenditures, Collections, Circulation (WMS-based Reports):
Serials Titles: counts for digital/electronic serials (Line 43, column B) using your A-Z list, as recommended, should be made immediately following the closing of your fiscal year, because only real-time counts are available. Time-retrospective reports for this data are not possible at this time.
Categorizing Material Formats and Subformats: See the Material Formats and Using Pivot Tables section for “Material Formats and Subformats for ACRL/IPEDS” for a list of format types and how to sort them for counting, as recommended by ACRL. 2023 templates in the Toolkit now sort and categorize formats that need to be reported; some manual adjustments are necessary.
Guidelines from ACRL regarding OA, PDA/DDA collections and usage (ACRL 2023 Survey Instructions)
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OA |
PDA/DDA |
Notes |
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Expenditures |
Would not have expenses |
Report one-time expenses for PDAs in Q20 and Q20a if an ebook Q22 - include fees for short term loans as part of a DDA or PDA program |
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Collections/Holdings |
Include OA searchable through library catalog or discovery system, except HathiTrust, CRL, Internet Archive or similar collections (Gutenberg, DOAJ,...) unless library owns the digitized item and it is accessible under current copyright law |
Exclude e-book titles from PDA/DDA collections unless they have been purchased by the library |
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Usage |
Instructions specify use of COUNTER 5 TR_B1: Book Requests (Excluding OA_Gold) for book use For serials, “include count for OA e-journal usage if title is accessible through library’s catalog or discovery system” instructions specify using TR_J1 “and add OA if discoverable/available, please add note if OA counts were manually added” |
Do not include usage of titles in DDA/PDA unti/unless they have been purchased or leased by the library |
OA e-serials usage is available in the COUNTER 5 TR_J3 report Per FAQ, if DDA/PDA numbers cannot be excluded in the COUNTER report, please report with numbers included and note this detail in the comment field Survey excludes DDA/PDA collections until they have been purchased. If title is purchased in an evidence based model, and is searchable through catalog/discovery, count in e-book usage |
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More detail: https://docs.google.com/document/d/18_WzGwBSwdz6qhcCxnAl0gRYvFLZm3AEDS1zy5hHVlw/edit |
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Databases (Line 41B)
For number of databases, include all licensed databases, whether licensed locally or on behalf of a group, and whether or not your local library pays a subscription fee. Include those resources which are in active use (linked on your A-Z resources list or activated in Collection Manager/KB).
Examples:
Other guidance:
COUNTER/E-resources (https://libguides.palni.edu/analytics/counter)
Please refer to instructions provided on the SUSHI Configuration and COUNTER Harvesting in WMS License Manager LibGuide.
COUNTER 5 TR_J1/J3, TR_B1, and IR_M1 reports are available in WMS Analytics for License Manager users.
Instruction/Information Services to Groups - Counting Attendance (Line 71)
From ACRL instructions: “For multi-session classes, count each person only once regardless of the number of sessions attended if possible/feasible.”
2023 ACRL Instructions FAQ:
Clarification from ACRL with sample scenarios (from communication in 2021):
If you do two sessions for a professor and class and you meet twice on different topics with 10 students each time - that's two sessions with 20 students. If you meet with the same class for a two-part session on Citations - it would be 1 session with 10 students.
Scenario: I meet with Communication 300 on September 10 and give a presentation to all 15 students enrolled. Then in October, I meet with them in small groups to follow up on how their research is going - three groups with 5 students each. 4 sessions with 30 students.
Scenario: I meet with History 150 on Sept. 15 about the catalog, and 10 students are there, and then I meet with them a week later on Sept. 21 about databases, and 11 students are there. 2 sessions with 21 students.