From: Joan Stein <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2012 12:40:51 -0400

Subject: Re: E-resources usage statistics: up, down, or steady?

There is a great deal of research being done by the assessment
community in the United States, the
UK, and Australia (probably other countries as well that I'm not
familiar with) on the value of
e-resources, particularly e-journals at this stage but the research on
the value of e-books is beginning.
There has been a thin stream of such research for a few decades, much
of it done by Carol Tenopir and
Don King, but research activity has moved into high gear on this topic
over the past three or four years
for a variety of reasons, including the Value of Academic Libraries
Report commissioned by ACRL and
researched & written by Megan Oakleaf and the IMLS grant received by
several institutions to study
library value, including the value of e-resources.  The research in UK
and Australian has been driven
by their own national reasons.  I'd recommend taking a look at the
website for the IMLS-funded project:

http://libvalue.cci.utk.edu/biblio

which has an extensive bibliographic database of articles on a variety
of aspects of library value, including
e-resoures.  JISC in the UK has also funded research in this area.

In general, the research is less about the number of uses and more
about the impact of the usage on the
user.  Do e-resources make faculty, for example, more efficient
researchers & teachers?  Do they save them
time (that can then be directed towards other aspects of their
responsibilities as researchers and teachers?),
etc.  Impact, especially when/if it aligns with institutional goals
and priorities, is a more significant measure
than number of uses.   A relatively new study reports also on the
number of e-articles researchers read on
average per year, along with other elements related to the value of
e-journals - the title is "Scholarly Reading
and the Value of Library Resources: A Survey".  Information and links
to presentations and publications
about the study can be found here:

http://libvalue.cci.utk.edu/JISC

Research in this area from public libraries and special libraries goes
back further than that for academic
libraries and is not difficult to unearth via Google.

Regards,

Joan

Joan Stein
Head, Access Services
Carnegie Mellon University Libraries

On 4/19/2012 8:32 PM, LIBLICENSE wrote:

> From: Frederick Friend<[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2012 12:57:08 +0100
>
> Ann has raised a very interesting topic which goes to the heart of how we
> measure the value of libraries. It could be said that a library's value does
> not lie in the number of uses of items in its collection, but unfortunately
> descriptions of value without numbers attached to the descriptions do not
> cut much ice with those providing the money to support libraries. And yet
> arriving at reliable and comparable usage statistics is an impossible task,
> for the reason Bryan Skib outlines, i.e. that so many variable factors enter
> the calculation. Any number has to be accompanied by an explanation of the
> factors used to calculate the number. Change one factor - such as the
> percentage of older material - and the number becomes meaningless in talking
> to policy-makers.
>
> What can be valuable are year-on-year comparisons starting from a reliable
> baseline, and used in a context which takes account of the profile of a
> particular library. So for example, it would be possible to compare the
> usage of digital items in a particular library over time, building in a
> growth factor for the size of the collection. However, it would be very
> unreliable to compare that statistic with a figure for the usage of paper
> items over the same period, given the fundamentally different factors which
> differentiate electronic usage from paper usage. A focused statistic could
> help a library in making a case for support of the library for particular
> resources, but the more general the statistic and the greater the attempt to
> make comparisons between libraries, the more open to challenge any statistic
> will be.
>
> Good luck to all library statisticians!
>
> Fred Friend
> Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: "Skib, Bryan"<[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2012 16:30:40 +0000
>
> What counts as use?
>
> For reading, there would have to be leveling off unless campus
> enrollments and staffing increase. How much can one person consume in
> this manner? Expansion of access to alumni or the general public would
> of course change the demographics. Further, the max number of uses
> will be distributed across an ever larger body of materials, competing
> for attention. The percent of older material that continues to see use
> should be higher for digital than for print, given ease of access.
> Will aggregate collection management and demand-driven acquisition
> strategies reduce the portion of our collections that never see use?
> Will restrictions on resource sharing reduce the external use of what
> we choose to license?
>
> If the question is about use of online reference works and A&I
> services, users may well prefer other tools.
>
> Higher portions of the content might see a different form of use to
> the degree that large-scale full-text searching or textmining is
> enabled.
>
> My local picture strikes me as mixed, with continued (but slowing)
> growth in use -- and yet I hesitate to jump to conclusions since
> (overall) we are not always comparing apples to apples, or counting
> the same things in the same way.
>
> Bryan Skib
> Associate University Librarian for Collections
> 818 Hatcher Library
> University of Michigan