Notes from Research Advisory Committee Meeting

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Date: April 23, 2003, 10 a.m. - 3 p.m.

Location: University of California Office of the President, Room 6113, 1111 Franklin, Oakland, CA

Attendees: Ann Bishop, Christine Borgman, Colleen Cook, Michael Cooper, Susan Starr, Brian Schottlaender, Cecily Johns, Gary Lawrence, Claire Le Donne, Laura Fosbender

Summary of progress

Final print and digital usage data for the journal use study is now on the project web site.

CMI staff have recorded data about the number of journals that each experimental campus has decided to retain in storage. It will soon be posted on the project web site.

CMI staff have compiled the 56 questionnaires returned by users requesting that the print version of an experimental journal be recalled from storage. Twenty-one of the requests were due to the online version being incomplete. The second most common reason was that the user preferred to browse through or read the print version.

CMI staff have compiled what data is available on system outages.

The User Preference Survey has been distributed and responses tallied. Staff will be receiving final data from the UC Santa Barbara Survey Research Center the week of April 28

It was decided to forego issuing a version of the User Preference Survey for librarians and library staff, and instead to distribute a draft of the final report for comments.

Journal use study

With respect to the original research questions, CMI staff have been able to quantify the difference in print vs. digital usage, but do not have as strong a grasp on the characteristics of the journals that contribute to that difference. A study of the characteristics of each individual journal has proved too unwieldy. Some suggestions given: use ISI citation data, use publisher level data, use LC subclass.

A study of digital journal usage from January-September 2001 (year prior to study) vs. January-September 2002 (year of study) suggests that differences in digital use between the campus pairings may be exogenous rather than experimental. It appears that campus self-selection may be a factor. This raises the question of the legitimacy of comparing control vs. experimental campuses. With this in mind, CMI staff analysis of the data has been downplaying the campus-to-campus comparisons.

It seems that the most useful statistic generated has been the ratio of print to digital uses. Using the ratio, rather than the raw data, shows that publisher differences are not as large a factor as might have been thought. An outstanding issue is the unit of measure-reshelving instance (print) vs. article access (digital). Using ISI's figure for articles per year may lend some insight.

Depth of coverage is an important factor that existing charts and tables do not address. It may be useful to examine the known half-life of journals (cf. JCR) in conjunction. It may also be worthwhile to conduct single-title "case studies" to help interpret and illuminate the data.

Cost study

Cooper briefly summarized his work on a cost model for analyzing trade-offs in various journal collection management strategies. The common metric in the model is cost per use, and the factors being considered include costs for subscriptions or digital access, facilities, technical processing, and transportation and delivery.

User preference survey

Initial results of the User Preference Survey seem to indicate that acceptance of digital journals is widespread. Convenience seems to be the determining factor. As we look forward to implementing some of the CMI findings, it will be important to determine how we can increase the convenience of digital journals.

Barriers to digital journal use included: lack of backfiles, difficulty reading on screen, lack of recent issues, access problems.

It may be useful to stratify by subject, since there are disciplines where less-common barriers are critical (e.g., poor digital rendition of maps for geologists).

Next steps

The project is scheduled to end in June.

Upcoming presentations: ARL in mid May (Brian), DLF in mid May (Gary), UC University Librarians in late May, UC Systemwide Operations and Planning Advisory Group (SOPAG) in late May.

Ideas for other presentations/publication: CR&L, Portal, Library Quarterly, D-Lib, Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in Tucson, IFLA, NASIG, Serials Librarian.