Hi, I am Pallavi Murthy and I will be working for IUScholarWorks under Scholarly Communications as a Graduate Assistant through fall 2013 and spring 2014. This is my first blog and I am very excited to start off my job with multiple duties at hand! Well, let me put it this way- I am very happy to work on something I really love- Data and Analytics!
To say that data analysis is important to business will be an understatement. In fact, no business can survive without analyzing available data. Data analysis is the lifeline of any business. Whether one wants to arrive at some marketing decisions or fine-tune new product launch strategy, data analysis is the key to all the problems. What is the importance of data analysis – instead, one should say what is not important about data analysis. Merely analyzing data isn’t sufficient from the point of view of making a decision. How does one interpret from the analyzed data is more important. Thus, data analysis is not a decision making system, but decision supporting system. Data analysis can offer the following benefits:
- Structuring the findings from survey research or other means of data collection
- Break a macro picture into a micro one
- Acquiring meaningful insights from the dataset
- Basing critical decisions from the findings
- Ruling out human bias through proper statistical treatment. [1]
Libraries can use data analysis for many of the same functions that businesses do. My first project for IUScholarWorks was to perform such an analysis on their website.
Said and done, I am using Google Analytics to analyze the Libraries Website, specifically website traffic related to Data Management. I am also analyzing web traffic for Journals under IU Libraries, including JoSoTL and JoTLT, which the IUScholarWorks team has put a great deal of time and effort into maintaining.
Stacy asked me to review the data management guide so she can better understand which parts of her guide are the most accessed. The Data Management Guide has seen significant improvement since it was created. Describing Data with Metadata ranks highest as the most accessed sup-page under Data Management at IU, followed by Storage and preservation and Funder Requirements and Data Management Plans.
Next, Stacy asked me to run the analytics for Publication and Data Services webpage, so she could understand if people were using that webpage to find their way to IUScholarWorks. The report shows that IUScholarWorks Repository, Journal Publishing and Data Management Services is one of the most popular link on that page.
It is interesting and delighting to know how IUScholarWorks is trying very hard to make scholarly research and journals open access. I feel as important the efforts for making open access is, so important it is to know the whereabouts of the efforts actually reaching to its users. I would like to analyze more and more reports and bring in some valuable data wonder (as I call it!) in my next upcoming blogs.
To know more about IUScholarWorks, Depositing your scholarly research, Publishing an online journal and Archive and increasing availability of your research data visit https://openscholarship.indiana.edu.
For more information contact the IUScholarWorks team.
Sources: [1]* http://www.migindia.biz/data.html
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