From: Cendrella Habre <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2012 06:59:34 +0000
Dear All:
I have done recently a short presentation on this topic. To review it:
http://www.slideshare.net/Cendrella1/roilau-libraries
Regards,
CH
Director, Riyad Nassar Library
Lebanon
-----Original Message-----
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
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