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 Quick insight into information-investment
issues for presidents, CAOs, and other
campus leaders from the Council on Library and Information Resources
(CLIR)
Number 5, January 2002
The Issue for Presidents and CAOs:
Who Is Using
The Fruits of Digital Investment? |
Whether you head a liberal arts college or a large university,
whether your library digitizes its own collections or provides
online access to other digital collections or both, the question
is the same: Who uses these materials and how?
Do your online resources provide what students need for class
assignments, what teachers need to enhance course content and
create new learning modes, and what scholars need to do research
more efficiently and open new lines of inquiry? What investments
in digital resources would enhance your institution's appeal
to top students, distinguished faculty, and sources of external
support? Are digital investments helping your institution reach
its strategic goals? And how can you know? |
The Challenges:
"Hit" Statistics
Are Not Enough |
Academic librarians are working in multiple projects to find
answers to such questions. But measuring use, actual or potential,
is not easy. Rapid changes in library services make data collection
and interpretation difficult. The absence of widely accepted
standards for use measurement further complicates the matter.
Consistent data are particularly needed from outside vendors
of e-journals and other electronic resources so that campus
librarians can evaluate expenditures on access licenses.
Librarians have made progress in measuring the extent, variety,
and cost of online collections and services and the volume,
duration, and nature of "hits" by users. But librarians
want to know also about Web visits' usefulness. Therefore,
tools are in development for assessing usage quality,
and librarians are investigating how students and scholars
perceive, find, and use networked information from their campus
libraries in relation to other sources. What are we learning
from such studies? |
Discoveries and Options:
Getting the Most
Out of Library Resources |
Preliminary reports indicate that
- some digitally reformatted materials get far more use
online than they ever did in the library stacks
- Internet access promotes interdisciplinary study by facilitating
cross-collection searches
- online catalogs enable scholars to accelerate their searches
and enlarge the base of resources they explore
- use of online materials varies greatly by discipline but
seems growing in all fields
- scholars are increasingly comfortable with online research,
even many humanists, who once were expected to resist the
application of new technologies to their work.
Reports also suggest that while students and faculty still
come to libraries for books and journals, they may increasingly
value the library less as a repository than as a gateway to
resources throughout the world, an identifier of high-quality
materials for specific courses and research projects, and an
organizer of customized search-and-retrieval services.
An institution may best serve its strategic goals by facilitating
access to a coordinated aggregation of materials from multiple
sources that can meet an individual school's particular needs.
For the administrator, effective digital-resource development
thus includes supporting assessments by librarians of the online
behaviors and needs of campus users, and rewarding faculty
members who are willing to help. |
Additional Information:
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Use-study reports of value to academic administrators include
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