A Holistic Approach to Supporting Academic Libraries in Resource Allocation Processes

E-content revolution, technological advances, and ever-shrinking budgets oblige libraries to efficiently allocate their limited resources between collection and services. Unfortunately, resource allocation is a complex process due to the diversity of data sources and formats required to be analyzed prior to decision making, as well as the lack of efficient methods of integration. The contribution of this article is twofold. We first propose an evaluation framework to holistically assess academic libraries. To do so, a four-pronged theoretical framework is used in which the library system and collection are analyzed from the perspective of users and internal stake-holders. Second, we present a data warehouse architecture that integrates, processes, and stores the holistically based collected data. By proposing this holistic approach, we aim to provide an integrated solution that assists library managers to make economic decisions based on a perspective of the library situation that is as realistic as possible.