A little later than planned, but we’re pleased to announce that a subset of the data used by the project is now available under an Open Data Commons licence:

http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/11543/

This data set is made available under the Open Data Commons Attribution License http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/by/1.0/

The data contains final grade and library usage figures for 33,074 students studying undergraduate degrees at UK universities.

Background

Each of the 8 project partners provided a set of data, based on the initial data requirements document. Not all partners were able to provide data for e-resource logins and library visits, but all were able to provide library loans data.

In order to ensure anonymity:

1) the 8 partners are not named in the data release, instead they have been allocated a randomly selected name (from LIB1 to LIB8)

2) the names of schools and/or departments at each institution have been replaced with a randomly generated ID

3) the year of graduation has been removed from the data

4) where a course had less than 30 students, the course name has been replaced with a randomly generated ID

5) some course names have been “generalised” in order to remove elements that may identify the institution

Grades

The awarded degree has been mapped to the following code:

A = first (1)
B = upper second (2:1)
C = lower second (2:2)
D = third (3)
E = pass without honours

Library Usage

Where supplied by the project partner, the following library usage data measures are included:

ISSUES = total number of items borrowed from the library by that student (n.b. this may include renewals)
ERES = a measure of e-resource/database usage, e.g. total number of logins to MetaLib or Athens by that student
VISITS = total number of times that student visited the library

Other Notes

1) each graduate has been allocated an randomly generated unique ID

2) where the course/school/department name was not supplied, it has been replaced with N/A

3) where the measure of library usage was not supplied by the partner, the value is blank/empty