Re: "Would you be willing to write something about lib-stats for those of us who don't really know what it is? If it is not appropriate, then that isn't a problem, it just seems to have caught the attention of a few other librarians, so I thought it might be of interest."
Hi Michelle - not too sure what you want to know, and I'm no good at narrative, so a quick review below for those folks who might be interested (or not) in the fairly small usage stats community. Sorry to the moderator for this deluge on LIS-EJ (CS)
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You seem to have become the man of the moment on the list!
~ Doh! Always check your "reply to:" before hitting the send button. The original mail was only meant to go to Sarah!
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Lib_stats is...
A mailing list for folks who need to make sense of usage stats generated from e-js; e-books, databases; open access; institutional repositories and so on.
About 4 years' ago a bunch of like minded folk got together in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK to see if we could unravel the mass of data coming from publishers' web logs.
We decided to form a mailing list which now has about 300 international members, and includes publishers, aggregators, coders, agents, statisticians as well as serials librarians, plus folks like me who just like numbers and can't understand why more managers don't use this data (like most commercial companies) as a business tool to inform strategic decisions.
So whether you're the office junior told to get some basic stats together for the next meeting (ask for more money - it's a big job), or a manager trying to balance the return on investment stakes, we've probably covered it.
The key point is that the list is totally democratic with little moderation (I'm just the List Owner) and not aligned to JISC, COUNTER, NESLI, UKSG, publishers or anyone, so you can post what you like as long as it's honest, decent, legal and focused.
The traffic on the list is low during term time (so won't clog up your mail box when you have other stuff to do).
A recent posting: The Zero Use problem
"I know that this problem has come up several times before on this mailing list and is a source of concern generally...
On some platforms (eg Metapress), you have the option to download usage for all publications or just publications with usage. We have decided to download all publications so that we have the option of seeing subscribed titles with zero usage. However, we then have to go in and try and distinguish our subscribed zero usage from unsubscribed which we don't care about" ... snip
Recently I've become involved with analysing stats associated with the next REF - citation metrics, so all this is dynamic and has no real boundaries. I believe that understanding usage data will become essential - everyone I know in business/commerce waits anxiously for their monthly returns to measure the performance of their investment.
Does this help at all?
Best wishes from Newcastle.
Cliff.
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Thanks for reading this!
Michelle
Michelle Koster
Data Manager, Ringgold /Editor, Serials-ENews
lis-e-resources is a UKSG list - http://www.uksg.org/serials
UKSG groups also available on Facebook and LinkedIn
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