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Blackwell’s recent partnership with Library Dynamics allows us to offer our customers concerned with the development, accessibility, and management of content an innovative set of services for visualizing, analyzing, interpreting, and improving library collections, by providing previously inaccessible yet invaluable bibliographic, usage, and other information via a variety of graphs, charts, and tables delivering powerful results. Since 1998 Library Dynamics has offered innovative tools for assessing library and consortia collections; improving collection development; coordinating approval plans; and planning, coordinating, and evaluating library and collaborative collection development programs.
Spectra Services is Library Dynamics newest collection of tools that allow the librarian to understand quickly and visually patterns of holdings and usage within their collection and in other accessible library collections. Spectra Services offer unparalleled insights into the merit of titles whether they be individual titles or sets of titles. A library is able to sort the collective judgments of reviewers, library subject experts, and the usage patterns of tens of thousands of library staff, faculty and students in easy to understand Web-based and downloadable tables of data.
Spectra Services are comprised of
Spectra Dimension represents the most advanced analytical tool in the Spectra series of services and in collection analysis tools today; focusing on the most recent decade of library collection development. Spectra Dimension includes not only the extensive title holdings and title usage analysis but also trend line analysis, and single copy and multiple copy holdings and performance analyses within and between libraries.
For the library or consortia that needs to understand how the collection(s) arrived at this point and where it is going year by year these trend analyses prove invaluable. In each succeeding year Dimension analyses reflect the effects of budgets, library decisions, consortia collection development policy and practice, and user behavior on the library’s overall collection and in each area of subject specialization. The insight a library will gain from these trend analyses offer librarians an unparalleled opportunity to monitor library collection development, cooperative collection development policies and practice, and vendor approval plans in order to make needed adjustments on an ongoing basis.
Spectra CRC focuses on the entire library collection and has tools unique within the marketplace to analyze title holdings and usage.
Spectra Dimension and Spectra CRC allow a user to complete a number of separate analyses involving differing groups of library collections and various analyses at each of three levels of user-selected subject categories in a single sitting. Users can view lists of titles in categories of interest and focus on titles in the user’s collection, title of interest in the collections of others, or titles held jointly by all libraries being compared. Spectra Services provide multiple quantitative and qualitative indicators of title merit for use in assessing the strength of the current collection as well as titles which deserve consideration for addition to the collection. Along with Library Dynamics’ Spectra Services we also proudly offer the following other services.
The North American Title Count (NATC) provides valuable quantitative comparative data on relative strengths of your library in terms of title holdings in nearly 700 call number ranges and valuable longitudinal title counts in individual subject areas.
The 2005 edition of NATC includes data for a number of libraries including Library of Congress, the National Library of Medicine, and the National Agricultural Library.
NATC data is also useful in collection assessments, academic program reviews, and accreditation studies. Finally, NATC will assist you in assessing both emerging subject areas and the development of your electronic resources collection.
Library Dynamics provides training and consulting services tailored to the needs of libraries. These services range from:
For more information or a price quotation for your library you may contact your Blackwell Regional Sales Manager or Maggie McNair, Product Manager for Library Dynamics Services at Blackwell at 800-547-6426 x1272, or via email at maggie.mcnair@blackwell.com.
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