Diseño e implementación de un sistema de soporte de decisiones para el Centro de Documentación Regional “Juan Bautista Vázquez”

Abstract

In recent years, volume of library-related data has increased tremendously, as well as complexity of data sources and formats have been escalating. This information explosion has created a big challenge for data managing, archiving and accessing, especially in support of library decision-making. Knowing that a good library management involves integrating a number of strategic indicators, the implementation of a Data Warehouse (DW), that properly manages such amount of information and the complex mix of data sources, becomes an interesting alternative to be considered. This article describes the design and implementation of a decision support system based on a DW approach for the Regional Documentation Centre “Juan Bautista Vazquez”. To assure that all relevant data sources are included during the data analysis, the study utilizes a holistic methodology, previously proposed by Siguenza-Guzman et al. (2014) for an integrated library evaluation. This methodology assesses the library collection and services by incorporating important elements for library management, such as service performance analysis, service quality control, collection usage analysis, and information retrieval quality. Based on this data analysis, the study proposes a DW architecture to integrate, process and store the relevant data. These stored data are finally analyzed and visualized by the so-called online analytical processing (OLAP) tools. Initial tests of the implemented decision support system confirm the feasibility and effectiveness of the DW based approach, by successfully integrating multiple and heterogeneous sources, formats and varieties of information, permitting library managers to generate personalized reports, and even allowing to debug the day-to-day transactional processes.