Electronic Resources Blog

On January 5th 2011 from 9am GMT, the Emerald website will be undergoing essential site maintenance which will result in a period of downtime of up to 1.5 hours.

The QuestionPoint Ask a Librarian will be unavailable for approximately 30 minutes on Sunday 12th December.

Please be advised that on Sunday morning, the QuestionPoint service will be unavailable for the following time period: 07:00 UTC (2:00 a.m. EST) to approximately 07:30 UTC (2:30 a.m. EST).

As Homer Simpson once said, “People can come up with statistics to prove anything … forty percent of all people know that.”

Anyway, I thought it might be interesting to crunch some of our usage stats since we went fully live with Summon in August. The stats are based on our our EZProxy logs, which is the software we use to handle most of the access to e-resources via Summon.

First up, the total unique number of users accessing e-resources per month:

…and, secondly, the total number of PDF files downloaded per month:

The true total of full-text downloads will be higher, as not every site uses PDF files to deliver full-text.

Update!

Andrew posted a comment asking for the comparison with 2009, so here’s the first graph again, but with the 2009 figures for the total number of unique users who logged into MetaLib or an Athens authenticated resource per month:

In January, we should start getting the details of full-text downloads from publishers and these will be the key indicators of whether or not Summon is making is easier to locate and access articles. Although I wouldn’t want to predict the figures in advance, we’re hoping to see something similar to the increase in usage reported by other Summon sites, such as Grand Valley State University.

The Library at UCB is closing today due to the weather conditions in Barnsley.