Abstract

This presentation outlines the journey the University of Sunderland library took over the past 3 years to implement a series of dashboards to communicate financial information about our e-resource subscriptions. The paper aims to showcase the dashboards and highlight some early positive impacts that they have it. I will also outline the amount of time and resource required to implement this project, and to share some lessons learned.
The University of Sunderland Library’s business case for upgrading our library management system was in large part successful because we argued that it would improve financial control and transparency for all library staff and university stakeholders. The goal was to move away from a system of spreadsheets for managing orders, tracking usage, and managing budgets. Our spreadsheet system, while meticulously correct and effective, resulted in bottlenecks which we hoped would be eradicated by the creation of self-service dashboards for liaison librarians, library senior managers, e-resources and systems colleagues, and for university staff external to the library.
The new library management system was implemented in 2022. Work towards these dashboards began in September 2023 and as of January 2025, we have several dashboards which pull upon the subscriptions data in our library management system. These include:
• Dashboards for Liaison Librarians.
These dashboards answer questions such as:
o what does your faculty subscribe to and how much does it cost?
o How do subscription prices compare to one another?
o What is the cost per use for databases, specialist resources or journal titles?
• Dashboards for Senior Management Team.
These dashboards display:
o Current spending
o Year on year price rises for each subscriptions
o Monthly spend for the prior year
o Complete SCONUL dashboard (in beta) which should allow passive data collection for our return in 2025.
In addition, because the dashboards are underpinned by high quality, current information on pricing and renewals, the library management system is now (almost) the record of truth for ordering and negotiations. Though we aim to develop dashboards for sharing this financial data with other University stakeholders, we chose not to integrate with University finances or external subscription vendors, and the reasons for this will also be discussed.
Though we have had some success at this point, there have been challenges, which this paper will also describe. In addition, we had unrealistic initial expectations about the speed, ease and functionality of full electronic resource management. This paper will give honest answers to the following questions:
• How long did it take?
• What did it in involve?
• What were your major challenges?
• What lessons did you learn along the way?
• Were there any surprises?
• Do you still need spreadsheets?
This paper may be of interest to those who are planning a business case to upgrade their library management system or to argue for investment needed to develop staff expertise in dashboard creation. It may also be of interest to those who would like to explore what types of dashboards could be possible, and the amount of investment which may be needed beforehand to make sure the underlying data is complete and accurate.