Imagining the future
Data will become more sophisticated and joined up, to provide evidence that can work harder, travel further, and routinely feed corporate datasets and management
dashboards—thereby placing the library more prominently into the organization’s strategic environment. Usage data will be refined to the article and chapter-levels,
with greater clarity on what usage relates to what cost. Library datasets will be
extended to encompass a wider selection of collection usage and activity, including
link resolver click-throughs, authentication logs, and patron-driven transactions,
thereby augmenting other library data and, in so doing, enabling the development
of a new generation of services and analytics.
Shared services will provide the power to combine, normalize, and benchmark data
across formats, business models and delivery platforms at national and global scales.
Existing initiatives like JUSP (the JISC Journals Usage Statistics Portal, which takes
advantage of the SUSHI protocol to automate data harvesting), and IRUS-UK
(Institutional Repository Usage Statistics, which delivers COUNTER reports for
repository usage), are already demonstrating what is possible with this approach.
As part of the library evidence base, usage data will find real-world application
beyond local collection development and management, and an increasingly big
data approach will pull upon this data to contribute to learning analytics,
research metrics, and the creation of new knowledge