This research uses the methodology of web analytics toexamine the usage of subscription databases at a majoracademic library. Our research goal is the development ofkey performance indicators from which academic librariescan evaluate the business value of their content collections.There are 1,447 databases to which this academic libraryprovides access, and these databases received nearly 2.5million customer visits in 2012 via the library’s metasearchapplication, which is used for searching thesedatabases. As such, these visits represent a substantialsubset of the total traffic to the university’s academicdatabases. The first level analysis shows that the top 20most used databases represent over half the traffic to theseacademic databases. The second level analysis comparedthese heavily used databases (20) categorizing them byprovider, and quantifying them with the remainingdatabases (428) from these providers. These results showthe inequality of traffic generated by the top databasesrelative to the remaining databases from these providers inthe context of search. The implications of this inequalityillustrate the extreme usefulness of select databases and thepossibility of the dispensability of less popular databases.The third level of analysis is a temporal evaluation ofdemand of databases over the course of two semesters(spring and fall 2012). This evaluation displayed the lackof increased demand throughout a semester beyond the top300 databases. We used this analysis as the beginnings ofthe formulation of a set of web analytic metrics tailored foracademic libraries.
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