Reporting

OpenAthens offers helpful library reporting tools which are being constantly developed and updated to ensure you have the tools needed to monitor and enhance your library services.

Use our customizable library reporting tool to make data-driven decisions about where to spend your budget and how to improve student retention, all included with your OpenAthens subscription.

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Make the most out of our reporting functionality

We know how important reporting is to libraries in order to track usage and monitor access. The reports are available with enhanced visual graphics rather than being purely text-based – this makes them easier to understand by a range of internal audiences.

We recommend spending some time looking through and planning what reports will be of most use to your organization. For example, reports can be generated showing hot zones – times when more people are likely to be accessing content and this can help influence staffing decisions within libraries to ensure you have enough people resource in place.

To make the most of the library reporting options, your accounts should include all the relevant information you want to report on – there are several options, see: Making the most of the reporting functions.

Read our full reporting documentation

There are two key report types:

Account reports

These cover account types, authentication totals, account locations and any custom elements you wish to track.

Resource access reports

These look at what resources authenticated users are accessing and can be broken down into any attributes you wish to track such as departmental usage so you can identify where further help or guidance may be required to encourage greater access.

The report interface, the Data Explorer, enables you to define what reports you want and which attributes you’d like to be included within these reports such as timescale, measurement units, groupings and more.

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Discover our new Reporting API

Our Reporting API add-on is a time-saving tool created with librarians at heart. It offers data granularity to suit your needs, helping you understand users, improve retention and manage your budget.

Find out more about our Reporting API
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Data attributes

Attributes such as Job role, Cost center, Department, Major etc. are customizable depending on your specific needs and technical capabilities. This is configurable via the administration area using the schema editor and marking attributes as ‘reportable’.

OpenAthens can recognize and map any attribute when user accounts are created by connecting to an external directory like ADFS or Azure AD. If you want to expand your reporting capability you will need to specify your requirements with your IT teams as they will probably need to do some work on their end. We are happy to help with the set up that’s required on the OpenAthens admin side.

You can also report on the activity of individual users, but before you do that please consider the privacy of your patrons. Our Reporting and Privacy documentation will help you get going.

Any report can be saved or scheduled

Library reporting tool demo

To make the most of the reporting options available, you must customize your reports to suit your needs. This means you must ensure that your user accounts include all the relevant information that you wish to track or measure against in your reports.

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Check out our library reporting playlist

We have created a playlist containing educational video resources about our reporting tool and our reporting API on our YouTube channel.

Watch our reporting playlist

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