Technically Random

The new issue of the Code4Lib Journal is hot off the… um… journal management system. This issue has some interesting articles including:

• Mining Data from ISI Web of Science® Reports
• LibraryH3lp: A New Flexible Chat Reference System
• OpenBook WordPress Plugin: Open Source Access to Bibliographic Data

I’ve done some similar work with the ISI data, but the method described in this article looks like it would produce some additional, interesting information.

Analysis of Q1 2008 WebBridge log file data is done and it pretty much confirms what we already know.

Incoming links to WB from WorldCat Local is growing. Web of Science is still the number one source of incoming links, but WB is getting pretty close and may take the lead at some point.

Incoming links from Google Scholar is also growing steadily, but not at the same explosive pace as last year.

The big surprise this quarter came when I looked at the originating links coming in from Biosis. Our other usage statistics and anecdotal evidence told us that use of Biosis has been declining, but the severe drop in incoming links, especially for February and March as compared to the same months last year is striking.

April and May tend to be big number months for our usage statistics, so it’ll be interesting to see what patterns develop as we close out the academic year.

- Corey

I’ve been doing some analysis of our WebBridge link resolver logs to see if they can tell us anything about usage of our electronic resources.  Mostly it confirms what we already know, use of Web of Science is high, use of WorldCat Local is high.

One piece of data that I’ve been keeping my eye on is the originating links coming in to WebBridge from Google Scholar.  Since going live with the WebBridge linking from GS, we’ve had pretty consistent hit rates per month.  All the more impressive since we never really marketed the service.

note: due to an error in the downloading process, we do not have any WebBridge data for May 2007.

My summary report for the WebBridge log analysis can be found on Staffweb at:
https://staffweb.lib.washington.edu/units/cms/collection-assessment/webbridge-data/webbridge-summary-2007

-Corey

The first issue of the Code4lib Journal has just been published: http://journal.code4lig.org

The journal’s mission is “to foster community and
share information among those interested in the intersection of libraries,
technology, and the future.”

Sounds interesting, anyway!

E-journal  RSS TOC (Tables of Contents) feeds are increasingly important for researchers in all academic fields. Scholars can track current and upcoming publications sometimes even before the articles actually appear.

News from ticTOCS:  http://tictocsnews.wordpress.com/  is a discovery tool for new e-journal TOC feeds. The site is affiliated with the  ticTOC Project which aims eventually to be a central clearinghouse of information about  scholarly TOC’s.  The blog (of course) has its own RSS feed, and a growing Blogroll with direct links to related publishers and sites.