LibreVolve · library science · shown in screenshots, 15 September 2026

LibreVolve: library benchmarking, shown in screenshots

LibreVolve is a benchmarking system for a coalition of academic libraries. Each library reports its statistics once a year against the indicators of ISO 11620. The system standardises every value against the cohort, shows each library where it stands, names the areas where it trails its peers, wires those areas to the interventions that address them, and re-measures the improvement cycle back to its target. The demonstration coalition holds twenty-six libraries, twelve indicators and three years of returns.

Address librevolve.publon.pressPages nineScreens shown tenCaptured 15 September 2026, on the demonstration coalition, as the administrator

Purpose and the people it serves

Academic libraries already report their statistics: to their universities, to national bodies and to the standards they subscribe to. What the reports rarely do is tell a library where it stands against libraries like it, which of its numbers matter most, and what to do about them. LibreVolve is built for the directors and assessment leads of a coalition of university libraries who want the second half of that loop. The annual rhythm is report, benchmark, diagnose, act and re-measure, and every page of the system is one step of it.

The measure is the performance Z-score: how far a library sits from the cohort on an indicator, in units of the cohort's spread, with the sign turned so that a negative value always means the library trails. Indicators carry their direction, so a lower cost per user counts as better where a higher collection per user does. The cohort is chosen by the reader: the whole coalition, the research-intensive libraries, the universities of technology, or a custom peer group.

Sign-in and the overview

The system signs in through the platform's member service, and the account decides which library a person may write for. The overview is the coalition's health in one grid: every library against every indicator, red where a library trails its peers and green where it leads, with the return completeness for the year above it.

Sign-in
Sign-in. One account per person, granted to the library it may report for.
Overview
Overview. Twenty-six libraries against twelve indicators as standardised Z-scores, the cohort chosen on the left, twenty-six of twenty-six returns complete for the year.

Standing: one library against its peers

A single library's standing is a card per indicator: the library's own value, the cohort median, its position in the cohort's box-and-whisker distribution, the three-year trend, the rank, the Z-score and a status of priority, on track or leading. A library that leads on most indicators and one that trails on every one read the same way, which is the point of a standardised measure.

Standing, a leading library
Standing, a leading library. Twelve indicators benchmarked, no priority areas, four leading indicators, each row with its distribution, trend and rank.
Standing, a trailing library
Standing, a trailing library. The same scorecard for a small new library: twelve priority areas, ranked last or nearly last on each, the trend arrows showing which are moving.

League: the ranking on one indicator

The league page ranks the cohort on one indicator, thirds coloured, with the selected library's rank, performance Z, percentile and value beneath, its position in the cohort range, its strongest and weakest indicators, and the three-year trend.

League
League. Collection per full-time-equivalent user across twenty-six libraries. The selected library ranks first, at the ninety-eighth percentile, with the trend rising over three years.

Actions: from priority areas to interventions

The actions page is where the diagnosis becomes a plan. The library's priority areas are ordered by their Z-score, most negative first. Selecting one lists the interventions in the register that address it, each with its impact and effort ratings, its timescale, the evidence type behind it and how many of the library's priority areas it helps at once. An improvement cycle starts from the intervention with one action.

Actions
Actions. A library with eight priority areas. Visits per user is selected, ranked last of twenty-six, and the register offers six interventions for it, each with its impact and effort, its timescale and its evidence type.

Improve: the cycle re-measured

An improvement cycle runs plan, do, study and act to done, with the indicator's baseline, current value and target on one row and the engaged interventions beneath. Re-measuring reads the latest return and moves the progress bar. A closed cycle is the coalition's evidence that the intervention worked, and it feeds the register's evidence ratings for the next library.

Improve
Improve. A completed cycle on electronic resources per user: baseline 1.16, target 3.16, reached, with three interventions engaged and one done.

Metrics, the board pack and the catalogue

The indicators are configuration held as data, not code: each carries its unit, direction, ISO 11620 reference, data type, aggregation and precision, and the coalition edits them on the metrics page. The board pack is the director's document: the coalition league by mean performance Z and the per-indicator distribution for the year, printed to PDF from the page. The catalogue is the read-only view of the tables beneath: libraries, observations, indicators, cohorts and the encyclopaedia of interventions.

Metrics
Metrics. Twelve indicators with their units, directions and ISO 11620 references, one selected for editing.
Board pack
Board pack. The coalition sector report for the year: the league by mean Z and the per-indicator distribution.
Catalogue
Catalogue. The twenty-six libraries with their kind, region and size.

Where it runs, and what it is not

LibreVolve runs on the Publon platform against its own database, with the benchmarking engine as a reusable service and the interface as a configuration of it. The demonstration coalition is a generated world of twenty-six libraries with three years of returns, so the numbers are consistent but not any library's. A production coalition starts from its own libraries and its own first return.

It is not a statistics package and not a statutory return. It measures what the coalition agreed to measure, against the standard the coalition chose, and it stops at the actions the coalition's own register holds.

State on 15 September 2026

Every page was captured on the live demonstration with no page errors. The world shown is the generated coalition: twenty-six libraries, twelve indicators, 936 observations, 21 interventions engaged, one improvement cycle complete. The annual return, custom peer groups, the satisfaction instrument and usage harvesting exist in the system and are not shown here.