Predavanje Paula Canninga: IEEE XPLORE - Engineering Library

Both the library and scholarly communities emphasize the importance of quantifying usage to measure the relative value of scholarly resources. Journal usage in the era of print-only materials was measured by the effort needed to restock journals after each use. Today, usage data is a priority for academic and corporate organizations as demonstrated by the COUNTER initiative. Usage measured by articles downloaded is an accepted method to judge the relative value of a full-text electronic resource. The more full-text articles downloaded, the more the resource is needed by the client community.

The annual publication of the Journal Citation Report by Thomson Scientific is generally accepted as a more precise measure of value, quantifying the citation impact of existing scientific journals on the latest research. This may be viewed primarily as an academic measure or metric. Citation impact of a journal title to published science shows its importance to scholarship but cannot readily be valued in financial or economic terms. Because citation impact is a measure of both quality and usage, it is used as an accepted approach to justifying subscriptions and the ongoing costs of maintaining a scientific collection. Measuring value with journal citation impact is a more sophisticated approach to quantifying value than then by simply counting downloads.

An additional metric is proposed to evaluating scholarly collections: patent citation analysis. Three studies conducted by an independent research firm outline the use of scholarly materials in patents. The first shows the patent set from 1997 to 2004 issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. A second study, with a similar methodology, outlines the use of scientific research in the patents granted in 2005 by the European Patent Office.

Using these studies, the presentation will outline a general approach to evaluating online collections.