U.S. academic libraries: understanding their web presence and their relationship with economic indicators

Abstract

The main goal of this research is to analyze the web structure and performance of units and services belonging to U.S. academic libraries in order to check their suitability for webometric studies. Our objectives include studying their possible correlation with economic data and assessing their use for complementary evaluation purposes. We conducted a survey of library homepages, institutional repositories, digital collections, and online catalogs (a total of 374 URLs) belonging to the 100 U.S. universities with the highest total expenditures in academic libraries according to data provided by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Several data points were taken and analyzed, including web variables (page count, external links, and visits) and economic variables (total expenditures, expenditures on printed and electronic books, and physical visits). The results indicate that the variety of URL syntaxes is wide, diverse and complex, which produces a misrepresentation of academic libraries' web resources and reduces the accuracy of web analysis. On the other hand, institutional and web data indicators are not highly correlated. Better results are obtained by correlating total library expenditures with URL mentions measured by Google (r= 0.546) and visits measured by Compete (r= 0.573), respectively. Because correlation values obtained are not highly significant, we estimate such correlations will increase if users can avoid linkage problems (due to the complexity of URLs) and gain direct access to log files (for more accurate data about visits).

Influence of the Academic Library on US University Reputation: A Webometric Approach

“…This effect is assumed is associated with the existence of big platforms and institutional repositories, such as CiteseerX, so that their influence on university web rankings seems a logical result. The low percentages detected on other universities with big online platforms is attributed to inconsistent naming and other bad practices in web structure and URL syntaxes, corroborating the effects of these web policies on web impact, found previously by Orduña-Malea and Regazzi [25].…”

“…To ensure accuracy and consistency from the previous study and other webometric research efforts, the same data sample and procedure Orduña-Malea and Regazzi previously employed was used in this study [25]. Thus, all data for the academic libraries are taken from that research, whereas the data for the universities is described as follows: first, the process for selecting universities for the sample is described; second, the analysis of the sample with web and economic variables is explained, and third, the data is analyzed statistically.…”

“…The first step for getting strong findings about the relationship of US academic libraries and universities (and indirectly university rankings) was provided by a previous study carried out by Orduña-Malea and Regazzi [25], who conducted a survey of library homepages, institutional repositories, digital collections, and online catalogs at 100 US universities with the highest total expenditures on academic libraries according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), including web (page count, external links, and visits) and economic (total expenditures, expenditures on printed and electronic books, and gate count) variables.…”

“…For universities and libraries, the values are obtained by adding the various URLs for each unit. In the case of libraries, as mentioned in Orduña-Malea and Regazzi [25], these values correspond to library homepages, repositories, OPACs, and digital collections. The data shows that for page count, four universities account for more than 20% of the content, a high figure, taking into account the size and diversity of the universities.…”

Mobile Web Adoption in Top Ranked University Libraries: A Preliminary Study

“…The reasons are mainly two: 1) the technical problems with the information organization ; 2) because more and more information is generated outside the library website, relegating its principal function as indicated in the NMC Horizon Report 2012 (Johnson, Adams Becker, & Cummins, 2012;Orduña-Malea & Regazzi, 2014). This last circumstance suggests the need to consider new ways to generate interest in the library to make its resources more acces-sible and visible.…”