Highlights from the American Libraries Association Midwinter Meeting
San Antonio, TX January 20-24, 2006.

This is primarily the business meeting of the association, and as such it is smaller than the annual conference in the summer. However, vendors like it as the attendees tend to be higher-ranking members of the library community — hence decision makers for buying products. This meeting attracted approximately 11,000 attendees and nearly 500 vendors. What was new? In my field of electronic resources, the buzz was around federated searching and statistics and analytics.

Several vendors are offering federated searching, some using their own technologies and others license search technology from MuseGlobal and others. What they offer is two-fold for the libraries; a single interface to the multitude of resources that a library offers and usage statistics on the total use of the resources. For instance, WebFeat will let the librarian customize any number of screens, charging only by the number of resources accessed. Say you can access a particular journal through an aggregator, a link through an A&I database and directly from the publisher. WebFeat will keep track of which path the user takes to get to that journal and present one set of stats for the journal, no matter what the access path may be. Plus, the library can see how the user found the journal article, helping to determine the usefulness of finding aids and browsing tools.

A new vendor is taking the pain out of all the usage statistics a librarian has to analyze. MPS Technologies, a Macmillan company using IBM's SurfAid software, is offering to do the analyses for the library with their Scholarlystats.com service. The library gives permission and access information to MPS, and they go off and gather the stats and aggregate them into one spreadsheet. The stats do not have to be COUNTER-compliant and MPS will massage and normalize the stats, if necessary. They also have a publisher version to help those hosting their own journals create impressive statistics for themselves and their customers.

The analysis of usage data, both for traditional web sites and for specific usage of electronic resources is coming of age. We've seen some nice tools for the web so these additions for specific types of resources are welcome. It is time that we moved beyond simple counts of downloads or hits for determining the success of our endeavors.

I attended the Publisher/Vendor relations Discussion Group discussion of the Punchlist of Best Practices for Electronic Resources. Any publisher providing electronic resources should take a look at this document as a nice checklist of what the libraries do and don't want. The 50-60 librarians in attendance focused on perpetual access and archiving, as well as COUNTER compliant usage statistics. Suggested additions to the list included DRM, ADA compliance, and privacy issues.

The Elsevier-Thomson battle continues with Elsevier announcing the addition of Citation Tracker to its Scopus database product. I saw an impressive demo of citation analysis and lateral searching. Of course, Scopus doesn't have the depth of coverage that Web of Knowledge has, but it wins in the breadth department, depending on the size of your subscription, of course.

Google was an exhibitor, striving to improve their relationships with librarians. They highlighted how easy it is to link a library's holdings to Google Scholar, making it ever easier for a user to connect directly from Google Scholar to the full-text for which they are authorized. Publishers not yet involved with Google Scholar should certainly take the leap. The secondary services are the ones that need to think twice. While all the librarians I spoke with agree that the A&I services provide terrific added value, they pointed out that students don't use them as much as they do Google Scholar.

The battles will continue among the major vendors for better search features and interfaces and better usage statistics and analyses. Users need easier and better access to the multitudes of electronic resources offered by even the smallest libraries, and both libraries and publishers want better ways to determine the value of a resource.