Journal and Database Usage Statistics Update

By Chan Li, CDL Data Analyst

• 2007 UC systemwide and campus-by-campus aggregated usage statistics for selective major Tier 1 and Tier 2 journals and database are now available on the Inside CDL website at  http://www.cdlib.org/inside/assess/usage_statistics.html#2007

Two types of reports are included:  Ejournal articles viewed by campus and Database searches & sessions by campus.  The aggregated annual reports represent a better consortial view of all the campuses’ data with two years trends.  Some resources included here are not covered by ScholarlyStats service at present.  The CDL reports are selective and not every publisher or vendor provides usage statistics.  CDL will monitor usage for newly licensed resources.

Usage statistics are an important metric for collection analysis.  Combined with other metrics, usage statistics have been applied in the title adjustment process and in publisher negotiations.  Usage data may be misinterpreted due to a variety of reasons.  Web crawlers and harvesters are increasingly common in the academic environment and are already causing usage data anomalies in CDL licensed resources.  One example discovered in the 2007 statistics was that data mining at one of the campuses in the Linguistics department inflated the usage for the journal Science.

• Beginning in 2008, two new accounts will be added to UC statistics: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory library and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory library.  There will be 13 user accounts total.  ScholarlyStats is continuing to expand its list of platforms.  More about ScholarlyStats service: http://www.cdlib.org/inside/assess/scholarlystats.html