Tuesday, April 06, 2010

Question: How are you assessing the impact of your digital collection?

A colleague is looking for examples, resources and case studies on the assessment of digital collections.  He is looking for information on assessments that aren't just counts (number of hits), but on the impact of the digital collection to the user community.  If you have examples of assessments that you have done - or maybe pointers to case studies, etc. - please let me know.  Thanks!  He will be very grateful.  (And I'll share what I hear with you.)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

check out Archival Metrics (http://archivalmetrics.org/) and the MLA research website (http://research.mla.gov.uk/)

While not focused specifically on digital collections, both are efforts at measuring impacts, effectiveness & outcomes of archives programs, and, for the MLA, library & museum programs, too

Genbook said...

While we do get computer analytics (web page hits) we also keep track of how many teachers are using the materials, and how much money that we generate using the digital collections as a sales item. We do not have a formal assessment that has been done, but rather rough counts and anecdotal evidence.

I do know of studies that have been done by genealogy libraries showing their economic effect on a community, but that's not quite the same thing.

Anonymous said...

You maybe interested in some JISC research which can be found at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/reports/2008/usagestatisticsreviewreport.aspx