Measure the impact of your digital resources
By understanding the impact of your digital resources (for example digitised archive material, open educational resources or journal subscriptions) you can manage them more effectively, improve support for their use and direct funding to where it is most needed.
Measurable indicators of a resource’s impact include: frequency and patterns of use; the extent to which it is useful, recommended or linked to; and audience reach.
What you can do
Understand your audience
This is vital when planning a resource or deciding whether to take out a subscription. Our guide to researching audiences will help you design and conduct audience analysis and use the results. Our Revenue, Recession, Reliance report concluded that a thorough understanding of users correlated with continued growth and success in projects to manage digital resources.
Find the appropriate methodology
The toolkit for the impact of digitised scholarly resources will guide you through qualitative and quantitative methods to measure the impact of your digital resources.
Measure journal usage
Our Journal Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP) can help you base your journal subscription purchasing on access rates: our use cases illustrate the different ways in which JUSP can benefit institutions. The Raptor system analyses log files to bring you usage statistics for any e-resource, not just journals.
Use business intelligence
Our guide to using activity data can provide business intelligence on many different activities, as well as data on resource use. Our report, activity data - delivering benefit from the data deluge, gives an overview of the potential of activity data for universities and colleges.
Case studies
The following show how different organisations are using impact data to inform decision making:
- University of Oxford - the listening for impact project enabled the university to demonstrate the impact of its podcasts, improve access to them and recommend policy and process changes to monitor impact in future.
- British History Online - the service enhanced the tools and features of its online library to satisfy the needs of researchers, teachers and learners.