Challenges Facing Librarians Today

1
Challenges Facing Librarians Today

• Denise M. Davis
• Director, Statistics and Surveys
• US National Commission on Libraries and
  Information Science
• Washington, DC
• 202-606-9200 ddavis_at_nclis.gov
  http//www.nclis.gov

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How did we get here?

• Technology
• Access to information
• Publisher as e-content provider
• Librarian as e-librarian and contract
  negotiator

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Value of network use data

• Measuring use helps understand
• Cost/benefit of content to library (and
  organization)
• value of content to clientele
• Promotes balanced assessment of collections and
  content acquisition

4
Identify a few key measures

• Identify a few key measures for your organization
• Collect them for a reasonable period of time
  (perhaps 3-4 weeks)
• Look at the data collected

5
Include vendor-supplied data

• Logins / session
• This is overall use of a database or access to a
  service
• This is a soft figure and is directly related
  to how your subscription was established.
• Session time-outs will impact this figure.
• You will have a consistent measure, although
  soft

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• Queries / Searches
• This reflects overall SEARCHING in the database
  or content delivery service
• This is the Good-Bad-Ugly measure
• This measure reflects quite directly the
  search skills of the user
• The measure will be consistent within your
  clientele group

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• Items Examined
• This is the measure of Full Text Views in the
  database of content delivery service
• This, too, is a soft measure
• The measure will be consistent within your
  clientele group for the period of data collection

8
Include Library-Supplied Data

• Number of individuals sitting at computers during
  the period of data collection
• Remote logins to library server or directly to
  databases through a proxy server
• Number of reference transactions where referrals
  to electronic resources were made
• Cost of resources, equipment, infrastructure,
  paper, toner, etc.