About

Project Background

The U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services has awarded the Information Institute a two year $248,600 National Leadership Grant in Education and Training, which began in October 2002 and will end in September 2004.

Research has demonstrated the need for a comprehensive e-metrics training program that:

  1. describes the relationship between a library's (or state library agency/consortium) technology infrastructure and the e-metrics;
  2. instructs librarians as to the intent and definitions of the e-metrics;
  3. instructs librarians in the various methodologies and approaches for collecting e-metrics;
  4. assists libraries to develop a management and collection plan for e-metrics;
  5. assists libraries to develop in-house training programs to instruct staff in the collection and reporting of e-metrics;
  6. assists libraries to report their network resources and services data for aggregation across public libraries; and
  7. instructs librarians in the development of outcomes-based evaluation of their networked services.

This award supports a national education and training program that provides public librarians with multi-faceted instruction regarding the usage of and uses for networked information resources. This grant was awarded to develop the EMIS that will assist public librarians, state library agency staff, and library consortia staff to better understand how to evaluate the use and uses of their online library services and resources. A range of instructional modules and workshops - currently being presented around the United States - are currently being developed as part of the project.

There are a large number of e-metrics available for public libraries to collect. Clearly, it is not feasible for libraries to collect and report data for all of these services and resources. Based on National Information Standards Organization (NISO) Z39.7 Library Statistics Standard, research that the study team conducted in this and other projects, and discussions with a number of librarians, we recommend a set of core statistics as an initial set of e-metrics given the wide use of licensed resources and key library services. This set of core e-metrics is included as modules in this EMIS web site.