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