Statistics for electronic resources

Abstract

Electronic resources represent a large portion of many libraries' information resources. This paper sets out how and why international and South African librarians keep statistics for electronic resources, which statistics are kept, and what the issues and concerns are with regard to statistics for electronic resources. The responses were very similar. The concerns raised by both international and South African libraries were found to be about the continued lack of standardisation among publishers' reporting of statistics; the time-consuming nature of data collection; the reliability of usage data; the fact that data should be looked at in context; and the management of the data. A concern raised in South Africa but not in the international literature is that some librarians do not understand the basic concepts of electronic resources usage statistics.