Does Urquhart’s Law hold for consortial use of electronic journals?

Abstract

This paper tests the validity of Urquhart's Law ("the inter-library loan demand for a periodical is as a rule a measure of its total use"). It compares the use of print journals at the Turkish Academic Network and Information Center (ULAKBIM) with the consortial use of the same journals in their electronic form by the individual libraries making up the Consortium of Turkish University Libraries (ANKOS). It also compares the on-site use of electronic journals at ULAKBIM with their consortial use at ANKOS. About 700 thousand document delivery, in-house and on-site use data and close to 28 million consortial use data representing seven years' worth of downloads of full-text journal articles were used. Findings validate Urquhart's Law in that a positive correlation was observed between the use of print journals at ULAKBIM and the consortial use of their electronic copies at ANKOS. The on-site and consortial use of electronic journals was also highly correlated. Both print and electronic journals that were used most often at ULAKBIM tend to get used heavily by the member libraries of ANKOS consortium, too. Findings can be used in developing consortial collection management policies and negotiate better consortial licence agreements. IntroductionAs the Internet and the Web removed the temporal and spatial barriers, users can get access to electronic information sources on a 24/7 basis using the web sites of their libraries. Libraries strive to meet the information needs of their users by means of using scarce resources and managing them effectively through library consortia. Managing collections has become a challenge both at the individual library and consortium levels. Individual libraries have suddenly realized that they can no longer decide as to what to license or not to license on their own. The administration of a consortium, on the other hand, was faced with an unenviable task of reconciling diverse licensing needs of individual libraries.

Multidimensional Journal Evaluation: Analyzing Scientific Periodicals beyond the Impact Factor

“…reported that 80% of usage targeted 26.67% of the collection titles of an Iranian consortium. Tonta and Ünal (2008) found similar results examining the usage of Elsevier's Freedom Collection at Turkish universities: 80% of all full-text requests targeted 29% of all journals. As mentioned above, article-based information is not provided through COUNTER statistics, therefor the percentage of used and unused documents is not available.…”

“…Since the number of unique articles accessed is not known, these calculations may cause bad decisions . If users of Journal A requested access to 50 unique documents and those of Journal B to 400, it would have in fact been better to keep Journal B and cancel Journal A, while providing access to the 50 requested articles from Journal A on a pay-per-view basis (Tonta & Ünal, 2008). Such obvious shortcomings of cost-effectiveness analysis based on Journal Report 1 have, however, not prevented librarians from calculating price-per-download rates.…”

Mapping of Organizational Democracy: A Bibliometric Study

“…The journals in the first region are the core journals related to the mentioned field and constitute the most productive journal group. Journals in other regions contain as many articles as in the first region, but are considered less productive journals (Tonta & Ünal, 2008). When Table 4 is evaluated, it has been determined that according to Bradford's law, the 34 articles in the first region contain one-third of the total articles, the 33 articles in the second region contain the second third, and the 32 journals in the third region contain the last third.…”

Portrait of a Consortium: ANKOS (Anatolian University Libraries Consortium)

“…In Karasözen et al 25 and Tonta and Ünal, 26 the relation between the usage of full-text journals and research activities was analyzed for various full-text journal collections. The distribution of downloads among the consortium members correlated with the publication output in the universities; the majority of full-text usage was in just a few research-oriented universities, the remaining usage being spread among the rest of the universities.…”