Value for Money in Electronic Journals
Abstract The author examines the proposition that electronic journals provide enhanced value for their costs when compared to print subscriptions. At the journal, article, and use levels, the author reviews the pricing policies of two different journal publishers, one commercial and one nonprofit. He confirms and extends these findings using recently published research. Whereas much research remains to be undertaken on the basis of standards, and definitions must be agreed on, the existing, albeit imperfect, evidence indicates that both libraries and their readers benefit significantly from electronic journals in the areas of cost per use and convenience of delivery of scholarly and research literature. This proposition serves as a clarion call for more detailed research based on agreed-upon on standards. Serials Review 2003; 29:83–88.
Measuring the value of library content collections
This research uses the methodology of web analytics to examine the usage of subscription databases at a major academic library. Our research goal is the development of key performance indicators from which academic libraries can evaluate the business value of their content collections. There are 1,447 databases to which this academic library provides access, and these databases received nearly 2.5 million customer visits in 2012 via the library's meta-search application, which is used for searching these databases. As such, these visits represent a substantial subset of the total traffic to the university's academic databases. The first level analysis shows that the top 20 most used databases represent over half the traffic to these academic databases. The second level analysis compared these heavily used databases (20) categorizing them by provider, and quantifying them with the remaining databases (428) from these providers. These results show the inequality of traffic generated by the top databases relative to the remaining databases from these providers in the context of search. The implications of this inequality illustrate the extreme usefulness of select databases and the possibility of the dispensability of less popular databases. The third level of analysis is a temporal evaluation of demand of databases over the course of two semesters (spring and fall 2012). This evaluation displayed the lack of increased demand throughout a semester beyond the top 300 databases. We used this analysis as the beginnings of the formulation of a set of web analytic metrics tailored for academic libraries.
Comparing the regional accrediation standards: outcomes assessment and other trends
An analysis of the current and draft standards and relevant supporting documentation of the regional accreditation commissions reveals a greater emphasis on outcomes assessment, distance education, information literacy, and encouragement for collaboration, innovation, and experimentation in teaching and learning. This article discusses the trends in the standards and makes recommendations for academic libraries.