Conference Reports

Publisher/Vendor Relations Discussion Group

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.