The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has awarded a $500,000, three-year National Leadership Grant to four partner organisations - the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), Montana State University, OCLC Research, and the University of New Mexico - to perform research and recommend best practices that will improve data collection and information sharing for institutional repositories and digitised collections.
Under the leadership of principal investigator Kenning Arlitsch, library dean at Montana State University, the grant project, 'Measuring Up: Assessing Use of Digital Repositories and the Resulting Impact,' will investigate the challenges libraries face in producing accurate reports of the use of their digital repositories through web analytics. Libraries routinely collect statistics on digital collection use for assessment and evaluation purposes. Libraries then report those statistics to a variety of stakeholders, including parent institutions, professional organisations, and funding agencies. However, lack of standardisation can result in inaccurate statistics, making it difficult to draw conclusions.
The partners in Measuring Up will conduct a needs assessment and explore the difficulties in producing accurate reports and analytics, as well as recommend best practices that will help improve reporting practices. The team will also examine how to assess the impact of institutions' digital repositories on the citation rates of academic papers. Citation rates are important because the number of citations often has a direct effect on university rankings and other performance indicators. Many of the recent developments in the "altmetrics" movement are predicated on the need for providing alternatives to the established citation indices in the form of usage impact factors and other new approaches that would serve as better predictors of future academic success.
