Despite large annual expenditures for content few organizations have a way to measure how people engage and use information from paid or free sources. This turns budgeting and allocation into a SWAG exercise. In today's data-driven world that seems broken.
There are many reasons that tracking the use of acquired content or assigning value to the work product of libraries and information centers is difficult. Among them are the lack of centralized management of resources and the failure to capture content engagement data. These are now solvable problems.
Centralizing the management of external information allows it to be more effectively used and also more effectively accounted for. Interactions between information center customers and content can be monitored and reported, regardless of the route the content may have taken to the recipient. For example, content from different external publishers may be combined in a briefing that is read across a range of devices from email to smartphone. If these services are built on a common platform this data is readily available to answer utilization questions, as well as other questions that impact information centers and allow them to better serve their audience.
For example…
- Which publishers supplied the most utilized content?
- Which were the most popular services?
- Who were the most active content consumers?
- What part of the organization do they belong to?
The answers to these questions, and others, offer important insights, not the least of which is; did we spend wisely and how should be budgeting going forward?
Attensa generates these insights by analyzing interactions with content across publishers, services, internal channels and other information sources. The graphic below illustrates this type of aggregated content engagement reporting.
While there can certainly be interactions outside Attensa, these reports enable analysis of the extended data from a range of sources and form a basis for understanding how content is being used, by whom, across diverse publishers and services.
We believe that helping people discover, access, and collaborate with scientific and business information is one of the most practical and impactful applications of big data thinking. Scientific content in particular is the foundation of research and is capable of fostering and accelerating life changing innovation. Understanding how information resources are used to make better resource decisions is just the start.
