Steve Hinckley, Associate Dean for Library and Information Technology and Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina, and Judith Wright, Associate Dean for Library and Information Services at the University of Chicago, moderated the discussion on “Statistics for Electronic Resources” at the Directors’ Breakfast in San Antonio. Spencer Simons, the Director of the Law Library and Professor at the University of Houston, organized the program.
To start with, here is a bit of background on all the different committees and organizations that have interest in this issue. Judith is Chair and Steve is a member of the ABA’s Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar Law Libraries Committee. According to the ABA web site (www.abanet.org/legaled/home.html), the Law Libraries Committee reviews matters relating to law libraries, including periodic review of the Standards relating to law libraries, the law library section of the annual questionnaire, and the site evaluation questionnaire. Membership of the committee includes law librarians and law school deans and faculty. Rita Reusch, the Director of the Law Library and Professor of Law at the University of Utah, is the incoming chair of the Law Libraries Committee.
Another committee involved in statistics issues is the Questionnaire Committee of the Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar. This committee is responsible for reviewing all questionnaires and instructions, including both the annual and the site evaluation questionnaires. The Law Libraries Committee advises the Questionnaire Committee on law library issues. There is also a Standards Committee which is charged with reviewing proposed changes in or additions to the Standards, Interpretations, Rules, Policies, Procedures and Criteria and a Standards Review Committee which periodically reviews all standards. The governing body of the Section is the Council. The House of Delegates of the American Bar Association reviews some Section recommendations.
Both the Academic Law Libraries - Special Interest Section’s Statistics Committee which is co-chaired by Kim Clarke, the Director of the Law Library at the University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law, and Jonathan Franklin, Associate Law Librarian at the University of Washington and the Relations with Online Vendors Committee chaired by Stephanie Davidson, Head of Public Services at the University of Illinois, are also involved in the issue. The Technical Services - Special Interest Section is also interested in this issue.
Both the Association of Research Libraries (www.arl.org) and the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries (www.aahsl.org/) have also been grappling with this issue and many of the “library” committees dealing with these issues have looked at the questions and schemes that these organizations have designed.
First of all, both the annual questionnaire and the site evaluation questionnaire are designed to track the ABA standards. The annual and site evaluation questionnaires are available on the ABA website (www.abanet.org/legaled/questionnaire/questionnairedocuments.html).
At this time, we count Titles (excluding non-book titles), Microform Titles, and Other Non-Book Titles. Non-Book Titles are defined to include manuscripts, photographs, audiotapes, videotapes, CD-ROMS, and DVD titles. We are told not to include electronic or web-based titles or products.
In the ABA annual questionnaire, we are also told to count Active Serial subscriptions and Active Serial Titles. Serial subscriptions are defined as any serial title, regardless of format, for which the library maintains an active record for continuous receipt. We are also told in the definition NOT to count serial subscription titles accessed via on-line databases (Lexis/Nexis, Westlaw/Dialog, Internet) unless the individual title within that database is a separately cataloged record in the library’s catalog. A Serial Title is defined as a publication (bibliographic unit) in any format which is issued in successive parts bearing numerical or chronological designations and is intended to be continued indefinitely. It is active if any pieces/parts/updates have been and are expected to be received on a regular or irregular basis.
In the financial section of the annual questionnaire, there is a question on electronic resources. We are told to include all monies for Electronic Resources including expenditures for all digital resources, DVDs, CD-ROMs, web based resources, such as Legal Trac, BNA or CCH Web versions, Lexis/Nexis, Westlaw, CALI, LSN, NetLibrary, etc., and contributions or payments to consortia or the university library. This is the only question in the ABA annual questionnaire that deals with electronic resources.
The two questions that the moderators posed for the discussion were: 1) do we want to measure; and 2) if so, how do we count or acknowledge everything we have available to our users.
There was a general consensus that we do want to measure electronic resources with the realization that we will need to be creative to do so since our current model does not reflect the new reality that many of our electronic resources may be part of the university library’s collection, part of a state-wide collection or a consortium collection, etc.
Many directors thought that the “right” statistics would be useful to measure compliance with the Standards and to provide meaningful management comparative statistics. Some directors were interested in more statistics in order to see what others were doing. Others were interested in fewer but more meaningful statistics.
Some saw the solution to the problem to be to count as a serial title all titles included in the catalog. There was a discussion of the possibility of working with the vendors to get MARC records to add to our catalogs. Others suggested that this solution would dictate the use of the catalog when others might want to provide access to some information by other means. It was also brought up that cataloging records are changing and that the definition of title might change.
A number of the participants also mentioned that they were interested in exploring measures such as LibQual that have the possibility of telling us something about the quality and the true worth of the collection. Some thought it would be even more beneficial if many schools used LibQual and we could use the results for comparative purposes. Another suggestion was that we might want to brainstorm possible qualitative questions to be added to the annual questionnaire.
Another suggestion was for us to set up a dialog with U.S. News and World Report in order to educate them on the impact of their use of statistics on academic law libraries.
At its April 2005 Board Meeting, the Executive Board of AALL agreed to join Project COUNTER (www.projectcounter.org/), a nonprofit organization that exists to promulgate and promote an agreed international set of standards and protocols governing the recording and exchange of online usage data. COUNTER stands for Counting Online Usage for Networked Electronic Resources. AALL, the ALL-SIS committees, and others will be working with this organization and legal publishers to identify standards and protocols to count the use of electronic resources.
It was clear that the directors were in interested finding a solution. Since this is an issue that we all need to tackle, it was suggested that we all begin looking at information that we can retrieve on our integrated library systems and from our webpages and give our findings and suggestions to Rita Reusch, the incoming chair of the Law Libraries Committee. Since we would need time to react to any new statistical request, it was also suggested that the Libraries be given plenty of notice. Another suggestion was that once test questions are formulated that they be beta tested and vetted so that they can be implemented with as much ease as possible.