RE: Usage reporting (was: Seven ARL Libraries)

[Liz Mengel <emengel@jhu.edu>]

Does it make a difference if a title is used by an undergraduate, 
graduate student, lecturer, tenured professor or a Noble prize 
winner hunting for an article? Research - undergraduate, 
graduate, and professional - is not a linear process. Sometimes 
discovery happens in the most unusual places and through an 
unlikely connection in an unrelated field. Title level use stats 
are just one point on a line. They tell us only one thing about 
the use of something not the whole story.

Elizabeth Mengel
Head, Collection Management
Johns Hopkins University

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Mark Funk
Sent: Thursday, May 07, 2009 5:18 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Usage reporting (was: Seven ARL Libraries)

I have a far simpler explanation than Phil Davis' concentration 
model vs. rare-and-infrequent events model. Note that the RIN 
study was "a range of university libraries." These would 
presumably include undergraduate students doing "research." Have 
you ever seen an undergraduate student do bibliographic 
searching? Most likely they started with Google, and clicked on 
about anything that looked remotely relevant (at least on the 
first few pages of results). They have little concept of journal 
quality, and they don't know the cited authors. Given enough 
undergraduates, of course 99% of titles in a bundle get some sort 
of usage.

Contrast this with Rockefeller University, home of Nobel prize 
winners and other outstanding scientists. When they search, they 
recognize the high quality journals. They recognize the authors. 
They only click on articles they know are relevant to their 
needs. That's why over 40% of the journals in a bundle get no 
hits.

When bundle publishers tout the "value" of previously 
unsubscribed journals, I always keep the undergraduates and their 
nearly random clicks in mind.

Monkeys / typewriters / infinity / Shakespeare.

Mark Funk
Head, Resource Management - Collections
Weill Cornell Medical Library


Chris Beckett said:
> Its is interesting that the RLIN study cited in the RUP
> editorial showed that:
>
> "Far more importantly, these big deals give university
> researchers access to unprecedented numbers of titles. And the
> evidence shows that they are making good use of this: studies
> for JISC and others have shown heavy use of journals to which
> libraries did not formerly subscribe. A recent study for the
> Research Information Network found that articles from 99% of
> the titles available in a range of university libraries were
> downloaded over a four-month period."
>
> While at the same time the evidence cited in the editorial from
> the Rockefeller University Library showed that:
>
> "For one of the bundles, the top 10% of journals garner over
> 85% of the hits to the bundle from users at the University.
> Over 40% of the journals in the bundle had no hits at all from
> the University in 2008!"
>
> It would be interesting to understand how these two contrasting
> positions can be reconciled.