The purpose of this paper is to describe the development and practical applications of a highly configurable online tool – LibStats – licensed under GNU GPL, for collecting and reporting on statistics in the academic library, developed at the University of Queensland Library.
LibStats – an online tool – was used to make quantitative and qualitative assessments and to benchmark the results against those of other academic libraries in Australia and New Zealand.
Beyond an introduction to the tool this paper explores the potential benefits it brings to the organisation in terms of information available to management and staff time saved.
LibStats is a tool which is available as open source software and which facilitates the collection, recording, analysis and reporting of statistics in an academic library. It is highly configurable, which allows for customised implementation in other organisations.
