You can now measure the impact of your online resource

The Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources (TIDSR), developed for JISC by the Oxford Internet Institute, is now available online for everybody to use.

If you have been struggling with making sense of hits, visitors numbers, log analysis, users feedback, wondering how to interpret all this data, how to gather it in the first place and how to assess whether your resource is being used and how, the toolkit will provide a clear, concise and easy to use framework for carrying out an assessment of the impact an online resource is having.

As the toolkit web site emphasises:

There are a number of challenges in assessing the use and impact of online digital resources: these include new methods, shifts in the way that people access resources, new audiences, and new forms of information-seeking behaviour among different audiences.

The evaluation of online scholarship is a moving target, and therefore a flexible set of measures and practices will be used. The toolkit consists not of a single software solution, but a set of recommendations for best practices.

The toolkit inlcudes useful information, related articles, tools and guidance on how to use a range of quantitative and qualitatives measures (including webometrics, analytics, content analysis of media coverage, focus groups, resource surveys, user feedback analysis and more) and is open for submission of additional relevant resources, or comments, by the community.

The toolkit was piloted through case studies of five diverse JISC Digitisation projects funded under Phase 1 of the Digitisation programme.