Library Impact Data Project Phase II: the data strikes back

The Library Impact Data Project (LIDP) brought its initial findings to the NAG Conference in September 2011, showing a statistically significant relationship across a number of universities between library activity data (specifically the number of items borrowed and logins to e-resources in the library) and student attainment.

Phase II of LIDP seeks to deepen our understanding of this relationship by investigating additional data from the University of Huddersfield. This data will be used to identify predictors for student outcomes, with a particular focus on engagement with library services, in order to understand better how library activity relates to student attainment, including causal relationships.

This paper will show some of the results from our quantitative data analysis:

1. Demographic factors and library use, examining whether there is a relationship between demographic variables and all measures of library use, and to see which factors carry the most weight in such a relationship.

2. Retention vs. non-retention, to see whether there is a relationship between patterns of library use (including increasing or decreasing intensity of use and time of use) and retention.

3.We will discuss in house projects, such as MyReading and Lemon Tree and describe how these could be used to encourage greater use of library resources and therefore improve attainment.

4. Predicting final grade. We will discuss whether we can use demographic and library usage data to test whether you can predict a student’s final grade from available data.

Finally the paper will recommend further study and suggest strategic aims and objectives that could result from the project.