In a previous post earlier in the year, Measuring the impact of digitised resources (12/6/2008), we announced the work that the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) was about to embark upon of identifying use and usage patterns of five JISC-funded online resources and devising meaningful metrics for the measurement of the impact of digitised scholarly resources.
This is a crucial tool for those interested in digitisation, providing much needed evidence and analysis of how digital resources are actually making a difference
At a recent JISC Digitisation programme meeting, Eric T Meyer and Katherine Eccles provided some background on how the OII is planning to carry out the work and the mixture of quantitative and qualitative measures they will take into consideration to gain some understanding of the use of such resources.
Quantitative Measures include:
• Webometrics
• Analytics
• Log file analysis
• Scientometrics / bibliometrics
• Content analysis of media coverage
Qualitative Measures include:
• Stakeholder interviews
• Resource surveys
• User feedback analysis
• Focus groups
• Questionnaires
One of the interesting things that emerged from their presentation was the need not to “obsess” too much about any particular indicator at any given time (eg, no need to look at web stats every month), but to consider a range of indicators collectively at regular intervals in time, in order to identify patterns over a longer duration of time.
The work will culminate in the creation of a Toolkit for the the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources, which will be disseminated in Spring 2009.
Presentation (PDF) on the Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources.