L&LR staff blog

It appears that the campaign to increase our RefWorks reach is having a positive effect (graph for impression only; no numbers):

N.B. #1 – the total number of RefWorks accounts in current use – i.e. our ’share’ – has doubled since last year, thanks to a relatively huge number of new accounts created this year.

N.B. #2 – we have a number of loyal RefWorks users who’ve been with us from the beginning!

Thanks to Stephanie RefWorks-COS for sharing these additional stats.

Somehow I missed this when it was first released. Which is a shame, because it’s very useful.

“The JISC Academic Database Assessment Tool (ADAT) aims to help libraries to make informed decisions [...] key service information for database and eBook content platforms.”

Compares platform features including authentication method, search functions, indexing, reference management compatibility, DRM restrictions, linking, and usage stats.

Link — http://www.jisc-adat.com/adat/adat_ebooks.pl

I’m pleased to announce that our subscription to RefWorks has been renewed for the 2009/10 academic year.

This year, for the first time, Library & Learning Resources are taking full financial responsibility for RefWorks, over from the Centre for Educational Research & Development. The University owes significant thanks to CERD for supporting access to RefWorks for our staff and students thus far.

This change in financial arrangements does mean that we (L&LR) have even more stake – literally – in RefWorks’ success. So, the start of a new academic year is the perfect opportunity to redouble our efforts and make sure the University is getting the most out of an indispensable tool.

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A note on usage: in December 2008, I roughly calculated that approx. 4.3% of the total University (staff and students) were active RefWorks users.

• In August 2009, this is up to 5.6% (612 accounts active in the last six months, out of a total University population of 10,981).

In December, I noted a shift toward a greater number of undergraduates using RefWorks, and a rebalancing of the faculties. Examining the same data (User Type and Focus Area) this month, we can see that:

• The proportion of undergraduate RefWorks users continues to rise: up from 39% to 51% – i.e. more than half of all users are now undergrads, which is great.
• Business & Law again are the biggest growth area in terms of faculties – now 19% of users are from B&L, up from 11%. Health, Life & Social Sciences are still the largest group of users (though this group will contain some people who are now officially part of the new Agriculture, Food & Animal Sciences faculty).
• I’m particularly pleased that we even now have some RefWorks users in the Lincoln School of Theology & Ministry Studies - hitherto unrepresented.

Here are the graphs.

Graph: RefWorks users by type.

Graph: RefWorks users by faculty.

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So: ideas for encouraging/promoting/developing RefWorks use in your own faculty or subject area, at the campuses, or generally? What could we do this year to get RefWorks usage up to – say – 10% of the University, and/or to shift the balance of usage to better reflect the relative sizes of the faculties?

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Here’s one thing I’ve been working on that I think has potential: short, single-issue video tutorials (created with Jing) addressing RefWorks FAQs, in the form of a blog.

• Link: http://refworks.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/

I’ve finally got a year’s worth of e-book usage data from both the ebrary and MyiLibrary platforms.

I’ve been commenting on the growth in usage throughout the year (since Michelle formally launched ebrary Academic Complete back in January), so here (without comment) are all the stats from August 2008 and July 2009.

Graph: e-book usage as a % of total usage (print+e).

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…alright, so I can’t resist commenting.

It looks as if we are definitely levelling out at the 25% mark – i.e., one e-book session for every three paper loans. It’ll be interesting to see what happens in September – will this 3:1 level of preference carry on into the new academic year?

My assertion that this translates to “one electronic loan for every three print” has been rightly challenged – after all, a new e-book session will be recorded every time a user ‘opens’ an e-book, whereas the same can’t be said for print loans, where the ‘loan’ is only registered once, irrespective of whether the reader opens the book thirty times, once, or not at all. Really, we need a formula along the lines of:

S = rL

Where S = a single user session, L = a print loan, and r = the number of times on average a student reads a library book they’ve borrowed. Anyone care to give me a figure for r?

What’s particularly interesting to me is that this growth has happened with – in the grand scheme of things – little in the way of overt publicity. I know that we’ve all pointed readers to e-books where they’ve been available, and I’m sure the Academic Subject Librarians have made sure their respective subjects were aware, but I’ve a hunch that the real driver has been the existence of e-book MARC records on Horizon, allowing readers to discover the e-books serendipitously. What would happen if we did the same for our 44,000 e-journals?

The usage data for Athens authentication sessions for the 2nd quarter of 2009 are now available on the L&LR staff Portal.

The initial impression is a promising one: overall usage via Athens is up 11% on the same period last year.

(Chart: Athens usage, 4th quarter of 2006 to date. Click for bigger.)

However, this figure masks some unusual features – while authentication via Athens to the Electronic Journals A-to-Z is up significantly, usage of some important individual e-resource packages (including the EBSCOhost databases, IngentaConnect, Art Full Text, Mintel, others) has actually fallen since last year.

Is this a reflection of changing patterns of use (or of preferred authentication method) amongst our students and academic staff?

Or could it be a mistake in the figures? I’ll certainly be checking them with Eduserv.

Curious.

Back in November, I blogged about the disproportionate nature of our e-journal usage, once you break it down by title (if you remember, one single title is responsible for 5% of all of our e-journal hits, while a small European country’s worth of journals are never accessed at all).

While looking at the A-to-Z usage stats some more, I started to notice some other unusual features – not, this time, relating to individual titles, but to the usage of entire packages of journals. (“Packages” for A-to-Z purposes, are things like Academic Search Elite, HeinOnline, SwetsWise, etc.)

Here’s a loverly pie chart:

Starting in the top-right hand corner (coloured light blue), 16% of our e-journal usage can be ascribed to titles from (the EBSCOhost package) Academic Search Elite. No surprise there.

Going clockwise, the next slice (the dark-pink/magenta/purply-brown/mauve/maroon??? one. I don’t do colours! This website calls it “rouge”…) represents the usage of our SwetsWise subscriptions – 13%.

Then, the first surprise: the first ‘exploded’ slice in the bottom right of the chart (cream) represents the usage of the various free or open-access e-journal packages which are listed on the A-to-Z.

12% of all our usage – one eighth – derives from journals which we don’t pay for. Most of this is from journals listed in the EBSCO Open Access Journals package.

Continuing clockwise round the three bottom slices (pale blue, purple, sort-of-peachy), we encounter Business Source Premier (10% of total usage), ScienceDirect (8%), and ABI/INFORM Global (7%).

The next exploded slice (blue) was another surprise to me… this 7% of usage is for the data-collection on the A-to-Z of links to the OPAC for our current print journal subscriptions.

…I’ll let that sink in… one in every fifteen hits on the “Electronic” Journals A-to-Z is actually someone looking for a print journal.

I only really added the current subs data to the A-to-Z as an intellectual exercise, and it’s overdue a review (they are created manually, and of course they go out of date quickly). Perhaps I should be taking it more seriously.

Going up the left-hand edge of the chart are:

• IngentaConnect (4%)
• SPORTDiscus with Full Text (4%)
• Sage Publications (2%)
• Factiva (2%)
• Oxford University Press (2%)
• HeinOnline Law Journals Library (2%)

The Rub’ al-Khali at the top of the chart (11%) is everything else. That’s everything else including Emerald, including JSTOR, and including LexisNexis. Who knew?

As I reported in March, a comparison of Horizon issue stats and e-book ’sessions’ shows that use of our e-books is going up.

I now have the e-book usage data (ebrary + MyiLibrary) and print circulation stats (all 4 sites, desk and self-issue) for April 2009, and the usage of e-books shows no sign of levelling out yet.

Counting one session with an e-book as equivalent to one issue of a paper book, there’s now approximately 1 e-book session for every 3 paper loans. That is, nearly one-quarter of total usage is “e”.

Actual figure for April is 23.17%.

Graph: e-book usage as a percentage of total loans, 2008-8 to 2009-4.

The proportion of e-book sessions as a percentage of total loans appears to have been growing in a roughly linear way since we formally launched ebrary in Jan ‘09. My question still stands – where will this linear increase naturally level out? And (different question) where would we like it to level out?

Addendum: if it keeps going at the same rate, we’ll reach 1:1 print:electronic by January-February 2010. Will that happen, really, or will it bottom out before then? Is that what we want to happen? Could we stop it if we wanted to? Could we speed it up? Is it Friday yet?

The Athens stats for the first quarter of 2009 are in, and they’re on the Portal now for L&LR colleagues to view.

No great surprises in store – though the graph [below] does suggest a sharper-than-usual fall from 2008/4 to 2009/1. Perhaps we should expect this as a feature of higher usage at peak periods: that the drop-off in use of e-resources during quieter periods will be more pronounced.

We’re still up 18% on the same quarter last year.

Click the graph for bigger.

My prediction was that our quarterly Athens usage would hit 90,000 for Oct-Nov-Dec 2008.

I wasn’t far off. Actual figure = 89,183.

• Overall usage is up by 32% on the same quarter last year.
• Three databases/services in particular have shown massive jumps: IHS Technical Indexes (presumably because we now have access to the Construction Information Service); LexisNexis Butterworths; and LinkSource (i.e. Find it @ Lincoln).
• Conversely, usage via Athens of a number of resources has fallen to zero; this because we’re now authenticating directly via the UK Access Management Federation.

The full table is on the L&LR staff Portal, at: https://portal.lincoln.ac.uk/C12/C14/eLibraryUsageStatistics/

• My next prediction: the usage for Jan-Feb-Mar ‘09 will be in the order of 78,000-79,000.

I last measured the use of RefWorks across the University in April (2008), and I meant to check it again six months later (i.e. October). Only slightly late, then, I can reveal that…

• In Apr. 2008 we had 348 registered users, of whom 276 (79%) had accessed it recently.
• In Dec. 2008 we had 778 registered users, of whom 461 (59%) had accessed it recently.

I’m using ‘recently’ to mean ‘in the last six months’.

So, our total registered users have doubled, which is gratifying, but proportionally we have fewer active users (i.e. those who have accessed RefWorks recently). I suspect the total number of registered users is a less meaningful number (because it’ll contain a number of students whose AD accounts have expired, but whose accounts remain on RefWorks, plus people who registered for an account out of curiosity, but who never returned). I’ll continue to monitor the number of active users.

461 people is approximately 4.27% of the total University (staff and students).

Breaking the users down by RefWorks User Type (with categories corresponding roughly to Horizon btype):

April 2008

December 2008

Not much of a change – a shift toward a greater number of undergraduates using RefWorks, demonstrating (I hope) that academic departments are encouraging use amongst their students – mainly at the expense of the figure for staff (many of whom will have registered early if they were interested at all, perhaps?). Proportion of postgraduates (both sorts) hasn’t changed much.

Doing the same for RefWorks Focus Area (which we’ve used for the faculties and extra-faculty departments):

April 2008

December 2008

More interesting: the faculty of Health, Life & Social Sciences have retained their dominance (expected, given their size and research focus, and the established use of bibliographic management software by key groups of researchers including CCAWI), but there’s been a growth in users from Business & Law and from Media, Humanities & Technology.