JISC

By understanding the impact of their digital resources (for example digitised archive material, open educational resources or journal subscriptions), institutions can manage resources effectively, improve support for their use and direct funding to where it is most needed.

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.

Our work has resulted in a range of guidelines, tools and use cases to help you measure the impact of your digital resources.

• Our Journal Usage Statistics Portal 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.We've also produced a guide to using activity data which can provide business intelligence on many different activities, as well as data on resource use.   See our report, Activity data - delivering benefit from the data deluge, for an overview of the potential of activity data for universities and colleges.
• 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.
• A case study discussed in the toolkit, Splashes and Ripples, extracts findings from studies into the impact of 12 different digital resources on teaching and research. Recommendations include planning ahead to measure impact and developing measurement and analytic tools that can be adapted for use with different sizes of collection.
• It’s important to understand your audience 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.

The following show how different organisations are using impact data to inform decision making:

• The Listening for Impact project enabled the University of Oxford 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 enhanced the tools and features of its online library to satisfy the needs of researchers, teachers and learners.
• Revenue, Recession, Reliance concluded that a thorough understanding of users correlated with continued growth and success in projects to manage digital resources.

We will shortly be updating our toolkit for the impact of digitised scholarly resources and are working to develop a pilot shared library analytics service.