Publisher/Vendor Relations Discussion Group
[Conference Report]


	
	
	




	Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship
	Summer 1998



	DOI:10.5062/F41R6NHV





Conference Reports

Publisher/Vendor Relations Discussion Group



Richard Llewellyn

University of Georgia Libraries

rllew@arches.uga.edu




Notes from meeting at ALA Annual, June 27, 1998

Susan Phillips of the University of Texas at Austin spoke to the twenty-two people in
attendence on "What Are Our Users Reading and How Will We Know? -- Statistics on Usage of
Electronic Content." Her talk was based on her work with the JSTOR Web Statistics Task
Force. The Task Force examined the type of usage statistics kept by JSTOR that would be
useful to librarians in their evaluation of online information resources. The group came
up with some "Guidelines for Statistical Measures of Usage of
Web-Based Resources" that could serve as a model for the type of data that all vendors
could/should supply to libraries so that they can evaluate the usefulness of vendors
services. 


The talk was followed by a discussion of the issues raised by Phillips. Topics included the
usefulness of different types of statistics, the logistics of electronic article storage
versus paper publication, privacy concerns with vendor information, and other issues.