Usage Statistics -Reply

[Angela Putney <aputney@aip.org>]

>>> "Claire Jones" <cjones@mcb.co.uk> 08/25/98 11:05pm >>>
<snip>

"A number of publishers are interested in usage statistics for electronic
journals and databases as they have been asked for by a number of
librarians - I have a few questions and would be interested to hear the
views in terms of whether (and to whom) they would be useful: 

<snip>

	You may want to keep in mind with such statistics is that unless
you are extremely specific in what you ask for, you may not be able to
properly compare statistics from different publishers. For example, one
publisher may only have articles available via PDF, so the number of
articles viewed in a given month may be easily counted as the number of
PDFs downloaded; a second publisher may have articles also available as
HTML files with figures/tables/special characters imbedded in the HTML as
GIF files (or TIF or some other image) and their count of articles may
include the HTML+5GIFs (or 10 or 35) since that is the complete download,
thus these two publishers cannot have their article counts compared.
Others may want to tell you the number of bytes downloaded which runs into
different problems - how many bytes in an article?

	Privacy is another question to bring up in this matter. I know
that libraries and patrons are very concerned about this. Do you want to
know how often article X is viewed, how often issue Y is view, how often
journal Z is viewed or what? Do you want the publisher actually looking
into this? [Yes, any publisher can now determine that company/university P
has downloaded article M 30 times this month and related article N 50
times and no other articles. Worker B at the publishers notices this and
tells his brother at company Q (of course, worker B is NOT a typical
worker and is soon fired), which now knows information to help it quickly
overtake company P (or some such related industrial spying). However, in
the day to day workings, the publisher is probably not going to pay such
close attention unless you ask it to do so.]

	The moral of all this is that not only should you think about how
often you want "statistics," but EXACTLY what are you asking for in these
"statistics." A standard can be developed that you want the publishers to
adopt, which would make it simple to compare across the boards and that
comparison would be valid.

		Sincerely,

		Angela Putney, Ph.D.
		Physics Management Fellow
		American Institute of Physics
		One Physics Ellipse
		College Park, MD 20740

		Phone: 301-209-3135
		Fax:     301-209-3133
		E-mail: aputney@aip.org

The statements above are my own and do not necessarily reflect those
of my organization.