Usage Stats Roundtable at ER&L, Part I
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.
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