Re: Online journal statistcis

[Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

Fannie Cox sends the following message:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 01 Nov 1999 11:21:59 -0500
From: "Fannie M. Cox" <fmcox@louisville.edu>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>, <mercerl@msnotes.wustl.edu>
Subject: Re: Online journal statistics

Linda,

While, I have not given up on contacting vendors for usage statistics, it
is very time consuming.  We receive a few via email and snail mail, but
there is no uniformity or any standards in which vendors report usage
statistics (at least to my knowledge).  Consequently, we have tried
tracking usage in several ways.  We have gone from paper and pencil to
using, an Access database, to inputting a CGI script in the holdings
record of our catalog record, and now to a server, just to track the usage
of our electronic resources.  By the way, we are a Voyager institution.


In fact, the Information Technology Director (Weiling Liu) here at the
University of Louisville and myself will be presenting a workshop on this
very subject at the upcoming Computers in Libraries 2000 on March 18th, in
Washington, DC.  We do not by any means pretend to be experts. But we are
still trying to trying to find the "best" way for our institution to track
the usage of electronic resources and still meet the growing
information/reporting needs of our internal and external clients.

I would greatly appreciate hearing from you and what others have to say. 

For what it's worth, I think that we as a community who subscribe to and
provide information from these electronic resources should work together
to impress upon the vendors our needs for "usable" usage statistics, at
least they could provide them in an electronic format.  

Once upon a time, I read/heard about a TASK FORCE TO DEVELOP WEB-BASED
STATISTICAL MEASURES. I believe their goal was to develop criterion for
vendors to use for reporting web-based statistics.  I would like to know
more about this Task Force.

Thanks,

Fannie M. Cox, Librarian
Electronic Resources Coordinator
University of Louisville=20
Ekstrom Library
Louisville, Ky 40292
(502) 852-2705  voice mail
(502) 852-8714  fax
E-mail:   fmcox@louisville.edu  =20

___________________________

>>> <mercerl@msnotes.wustl.edu> 10/29/99 06:01PM >>>

Have any of you been talking with vendors (Wiley, Springer, Elsevier,
CatchWord, Synergy, to name a few), and/or publishers (Cambridge, Oxford,
Stockton, etc.) about supplying your libraries with statistics for online
journal hits? We have begun this process, but if any of you have had
successes or failures you'd like to share, we'd be most interested in
sharing ours. Many thanks,

Linda Mercer
Associate Director,
Digital Communications and Resources
Bernard Becker Library
Washington University School of Medicine
St. Louis, MO
mercerl@msntoes.wustl.edu=20
314.362.4731