Usage Statistics: New Developments and Practical Applications 

When:
October 21, 2008

Location:
The Graduate Center
of
The City University of New York
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016
Room 9204/9205

  Organized by the NFAIS Committee on Usage Statistics

Final Agenda

  8:30am - 9:00am: Registration and Continental Breakfast

9:00am - 9:05am: Welcome

Bonnie Lawlor, NFAIS Executive Director
Judy Luther, President, Informed Strategies, Inc.

9:05am - 10:30am: Project COUNTER and SUSHI: An Update

This session will provide an overview of the purpose of Project COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of NeTworked Electronic Resources) and will discuss the impact that Release 3 (issued August 2008) will have on publishers and librarians. In addition, the relationship between SUSHI (the Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative) and COUNTER will be discussed as the two standards will move together in tandem into the future.

Oliver Pesch, Chief Strategist, EBSCO Information Services [ Slides]
Adam Chandler, CTS Information Technology Librarian, Cornell University Library[ Slides]

10:30am - 10:45am: Break and Networking Opportunity

10:45am - 12:15pm: Collecting and Analyzing Usage Statistics: Challenges and Opportunities

This session will focus on how usage statistics are collected and used by librarians and publishers. What data they collect and why, how they analyze and apply the data, and the pitfalls that must be avoided during the analysis to ensure that the data is not misused.

Joseph Zucca, Director for Planning & Communication, University of Pennsylvania Library [ Slides], Magali Colin,Chef de projet statistiques d'usage, and Dominique Lechaudel, Database Administrator, INIST [ Slides], Bernie Seiler, Product Manager, WilsonWeb, The H.W. Wilson Company [ Slides]

12:15pm - 1:15pm Lunch and Networking Opportunity (lunch provided)

Colin Cooper, ISSEL [ Brochure] and Gary Overborg, Scholarly IQ [ Slides]

1:15pm - 2:00pm: Institutional Identifiers: Development and Potential Use

A major issue for publishers, libraries and universities worldwide is the ability to uniquely identify an institution and its relationships with its various libraries, departments, campuses, etc. This session will focus on an initiative that NISO has undertaken to develop and utilize institutional identifiers that will uniquely track institutional relationships, and allow for more precision in product use as well as in improved user service.

Tina Feick, Director of Sales and Marketing, North America
HARRASSOWITZ Booksellers & Subscription Agents [ Slides]

2:00pm - 2:45pm: Project MESUR: Usage-based Metrics of Scholarly Impact

One potential application of usage statistics is to provide a measure of the scholarly impact of journals and articles. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has funded project MESUR for just this purpose - to provide an alternative or complement to citation metrics for evaluative purposes. The project, undertaken by the Digital Library Research and Prototyping Team at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, will discuss efforts to date to develop a set of guidelines and specifications for the application of usage-based scholarly evaluation.

Dr. Michael J. Kurtz, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics [ Slides]

2:45pm - 3:00pm: Break and Networking Opportunity

3:00pm - 3:45pm: Usage Factor: The Final Report and Next Steps

The United Kingdom Serials Group (UKSG) recently sponsored a study by Project COUNTER to determine the feasibility of developing a new metric for assessing journal quality - one that is based on the electronic traffic on a journal's site. The final report will be discussed along with a prognosis for the future of such metrics.

John McDonald, Director, Information & Bibliographic Management and Faculty Relations, Libraries, Claremont University Consortium [ Slides]

3:45pm - 4:30pm: Usage Statistics: Future Developments

Usage statistics, if gathered and analyzed correctly, can provide a wealth of information to librarians and publishers for a variety of purposes - collection development, new products, marketing, customer support, etc. What more can be expected? How will such data be used in the future to help organizations make informed decisions, especially as the first generation of born-digital information users take on roles of faculty, researchers, and scholars? What does the future hold?

James Mouw, Assistant Director for Technical and Electronic Services, University of Chicago Libraries [ Slides]

4:30pm: Adjournment