The impact of digital library service on scientific production of a media sized university : the University of Messina's experience

摘要

The university of Messina has been part of aninter-university consortium (the CIBER consortium:http://www.uniciber.it/fileadmin/user_upload/CIBER_presentazioneEN_apr2006.pdf) since 2000.The consortium was set up in order to reduce the impact on university budgets of high costs of scholarly e-journals and A&I databases by sharing subscriptions between a number of institutions and by signing collective contracts with publishers.Right from the outset, Messina U. has accessed the "Emeroteca Virtuale" digital library (E.V.), which distributes e-journal titles from a dozen commercial publishers, half of these available in full-text format locally. In the past year the "Centro di Ateneo delle Biblioteche" (CAB) of Messina U. has been working, together with CASPUR and the 'Istituto Superiore di Sanità', in the E.V. users statistics team, which aims to define a new environment for statistical data concerning E.V. usage of CIBER consortium users (mainly professors, researchers, and students belonging to those universities).The result of this joint activity is a new web site showing the usage statistics for all the members of the CIBER consortium (34); the format for usage data is fully compliant with recent COUNTER project specifications(http://www.projectcounter.org/). Moreover, through this web site it is possible to obtain a detailed view of E.V. usage data, including TOP style reports, analytical reports, subject categories classification and so on.A new study has recently begun in order to analyze the possible impact of E.V. usage on the scientific production of professors and researchers. For the purposes of this study we intend to work on usage data from Messina U. The main idea is to identify a relatively long time period (the last two years) and a sample of the university population (from a single scientific discipline). From this starting point, we intend to analyze the usage data for journals belonging to that area, and to correlate those numbers with the number of articles published from scholars of that discipline in order to validate the hypothesis of a direct correlation between digital library usage and scientific production.This presentation will illustrate the main features of the new E.V. usage statistics portal for the CIBER consortium and the approach we decided to adopt in order to carry out this specific study.