Bonnie Tijerina March 28th, 2008

Below are issues that were touched upon. Hopefully we can have further discussions on these.

Best Practices
It was suggested that we need best practices for gathering and reporting usage statistics. Margaret Hogarth and Virginia Kinman will begin work on this.

Are libraries developing a culture of assessment?
We need to figure out a way to share data with others so we can incorporate the information into how we make decisions.
How are we interpreting or adding value to usage data?

Benchmarks/Baselines
It was asked if there is a way we could derive baselines/benchmarks for subject areas. A ratio between use and FTE was suggested.

User Behavior
Institutions want to use the data that they have to create a better picture of their users. They are working on connecting the data pieces to see where the information is leading. Who is doing this and how are these results used?

NISO Library and Scholarly Usage Data Conversation Wiki
NISO Library and Scholarly Usage Data Conversation wiki was created following the NISO Usage Data Forum, 1-2 November 2007, in Dallas, TX primarily to provide a place for folks who care about library and scholarly usage data to work together to develop a decision framework to help those organizations trying to figure out how to approach usage data.

Tags: Conference 2008, Discussions, E-Journals, Usage

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Bonnie Tijerina March 28th, 2008

This roundtable discussion on Usage Stats was lead by Margaret Hogarth(UC-Rvierside), George Boston(Western Michigan University), and Michael Whang(Western Michigan University). This is an overview of topics covered during the discussion. Contact Margaret for the full notes and contact information - margaret.hogarth at ucr.edu

Case Studies
To begin our discussion, we took a survey to see how many people in the room had well-established usage statistics gathering programs and tools and 4 responded. Most of the other attendees were gathering and processing usage statistics, but doing a significant amount of data manipulation. The 4 gave us an overview of what their gathering looks like.

Nancy Beals (Wayne State) reported that they acquired Scholarly Stats in January, but haven’t used the reports yet. They use Innovative’s ERM and SUSHI, and are supplementing data loading by hand. They were able to justify the cost of the system through the efforts of their Systems Librarian. It will be for use in collection development decisions.
They are still experiencing problems with the cost per use data and SUSHI.

Virginia R. Kinman’s institution (Longwood University) recently purchased Serials Solutions 360 Counter.
They have not been focusing on journal-level statistics, but would like that information. She manually puts non-COUNTER data into COUNTER format so it can be evaluated across the COUNTER-compliant resources.
An assistant does the download and Virginia does the number crunching.
They have set up a fairly complicated Access database with a table for all of elements that match to provider and database. There is a form for each database and the assistant enters the metrics. The assistant prepares the reports and puts them into Excel. They are an Innovative shop, but do not have an ERM. They have put in cost data. Statistics are gathered on a monthly basis.

Joseph Thomas (Cornell University) pointed out that he is new to Cornell and is still in learning mode. They use Scholarly Stats and an ERM, but are having some trouble. They also use JUR (Journal Use Reports) from ISI. Joseph asked what is the right amount of work to do so there is evidence that a resource is being used?

Anita Wilcox’s institution (University College Cork, Ireland) has a 2-tier system for usage statistics. She gathers the local statistics and those for the consortium level, also. In this way members of the consortium share the burden of downloading and disseminating statistics. The report goes out to participating institutions and to the Department of Education. The institutions can then use the statistics reports to negotiate with vendors. In illustration, in 2006 they noticed that Wiley Ref Works wasn’t being used much except for 5 titles. They took the usage information back to Wiley and renegotiated for those 5 titles and Wiley agreed. When institutions buy from vendors, the vendors are aware purchases are based on usage.
Usage statistics are downloaded monthly. There are over 200 databases, so it is a huge task to maintain on a local level.

Tags: Conference 2008, Discussions, E-Journals, ERMs, Usage

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artadobbs December 3rd, 2007

November 28 News Release…..

Portico Archive Supports First Trigger Event

Graft: Organ and Cell Transplantation, published by SAGE Publications from January 2001 to March 2003, will be removed from SAGE’s online offering at the end of this year creating the first ever trigger event for the Portico archive and Portico’s participating publishers and libraries.

Because SAGE Publications, a leading international publisher of electronic media, journals and books, has ensured that Graft is preserved in the Portico archive and because Graft will not be offered by any other commercial online source, Portico will “light up” this portion of the Portico archive and provide access to literature that otherwise would be lost to the scholarly community. Through this first trigger event Portico demonstrates how publishers, archives, and libraries can cooperatively provide a permanent archive of scholarly literature published in electronic form and avoid a permanent gap in the scholarly record.

On December 3, 2007, Portico will make Graft available to its library participants via the Portico website and access via SAGE will end December 31, 2007. In the coming days, Portico will forward to its library participants instructions for accessing Graft. In the meantime, if you would like more information about Portico, or would like to discuss your institution’s participation in Portico, please contact us at participation@portico.org.

Last updated on November 28, 2007

The Details have been released today……

This is not the complete backfile ……please read on……

As a participant in the Portico archive, your institution may now access Graft: Organ and Cell Transplantation, published by SAGE Publications from January 2001 to March 2003 via Portico. As recently announced, Graft will be removed from SAGE’s online offering at the end of this year creating the first ever trigger event for the Portico archive and participating publishers and libraries. (The full announcement is available at http://www.portico.org/news/112807.html.)

As of today, Portico has made Volumes 4 through 6 of Graft available to our library participants. (Please note that Volumes 1-3 of Graft were published by Landes Bioscience, and we are attempting to contact this former publisher about archival arrangements for these earliest issues.) Graft issues will be accessible to your students, faculty and staff through a new “Access Archive” link on the Portico homepage (www.portico.org) through which users will be able to browse, print and search all triggered content. Beginning January 1, 2008, these Graft volumes will no longer be available via the SAGE website, and libraries wishing to redirect link resolvers should note the Stable URL below. Portico will be taking responsibility for the Graft DOIs in December, and DOI links will continue to work and will be directed to the content at Portico. We are also working with the holdings data vendors and linking services to include information about Graft at Portico in the coming weeks.

We have summarized below key facts about the content in Graft that will be triggered and available to participating libraries via the Portico archive:

Especially because this is the community’s first trigger event experience, we welcome any comments, questions or concerns you might have about this event. Please contact us at support@portico.org to share your input.

Regards,

Tags: Archiving, E-Journals, Perpetual Access

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dchvatal January 30th, 2007

As a preliminary investigation to the nature and content of my presentation, entitled: Institutional Identifiers in the Journal Supply Chain, go to http://www.journalsupplychain.org/ for information about the creation of Identify as a registry for institutional identification. You will find web-based resources, white papers, and summaries of current activity regarding a Pilot Project to improve efficiencies in the “journal supply chain”. What is the journal supply chain? Business activity (orders, claims, renewals) and communication (authentication, authorization) between interested parties: publishers, subscription agents, journal hosting platforms, fulfillment software companies, link resolvers, integrated library system vendors, libraries, other institutional and personal subscribers to journals and end-users of journal content. Whew. That’s a lot of ground to cover. For those deciding to participate in this program event, check the Course later and I will provide a link where you can look up the number of your institution’s identity along with the PowerPoint to be made at the conference.

Donald Chvatal

Tags: Conference 2007, E-Journals, ERMs, Resources

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Charlene Barina January 28th, 2007

Sent to me by a friend with whom we had been talking about what people should do as they graduate and begin doing research…

“Open Access to Science Under Attack” (SciAm article)
“The Open Access Debate” (blog entry by author of above)

Tags: E-Journals

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Charlene Barina January 25th, 2007

Once again, from slashdot, an article from Nature discusses the responses of science publishers to a rising interest in open access. From the article:

“…a group of big scientific publishers has hired the pit bull to take on the free-information movement, which campaigns for scientific results to be made freely available. Some traditional journals, which depend on subscription charges, say that open-access journals and public databases of scientific papers such as the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) PubMed Central, threaten their livelihoods.”

The article specifically mentions Elsevier, Wiley, and the American Chemical Society as getting together to discuss this issue to them. Wonder how those being merged-into at Blackwell feel, if anything, about this?

Tags: E-Journals

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