IGeLU 2024

Conference

Karolinska Institutet University Library has reworked our Alma Analytics tool for journal evaluation, used by the acquisitions team at the library to evaluate subscriptions – including COUNTER usage data and subscription components of a large number of transformative Read & Publish agreements.

We held workshops to capture the needs of the acquisitions team. What worked well or not in our existing tool, and what could they do without? Taking cues from agile development, we worked with our user group throughout development to account for their needs.

A key difference from the development of our prior tool is that we also considered those creating and maintaining the solution – they are, in fact, users too!  Our first tool seemed to follow an every need counts principle, in the end creating a maintenance monstrosity from whose claws we set out to take back a coveted treasure – our time and peace of mind!  This turned out to help address some of the pain points stated by our end users too.

Practical Applications