Five Quick Questions

Julia Demasi, Library Assistant and LIS Student, Instituto de Ingeniería Eléctrica, Facultad de Ingeniería, Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay

1. What kind of tracking do you conduct to evaluate success of your libraries?

Currently I'm leading two annual projects. One tracking project looks at the quality of our electrical engineering journals, most of them available in print only, and the other looks at the real value of our library system — not only in engineering but also in related subjects.

2. How are you evaluating the quality of your journal collection in electrical engineering?

The approach I'm taking involves two parts. First I see how many of our faculty researchers cite — in their published articles — journals provided by the Electrical Engineering Library, a satellite library of the faculty's central library. Second, I survey faculty researchers via an annual questionnaire asking which are, in their opinion, the top journals in their area. Given the high level of coincidence of information gathered in both parts, I can say our electrical engineering journal collection appears to be of high quality. In fact, this collection sees excellent use from users within and outside the institute.

3. And how are you assessing the value of your libraries in toto?

Each year, teachers in the Faculty of Engineering must submit reports listing, among other information, their writings published during that year. In reviewing references included in these publications — written by members of our own research community — I see which references cite resources held by our libraries and which cite resources held beyond our library. To perform such a review, I simply run searches of our OPAC.

4. What have your reviews of researchers' citations shown?

These citations refer often to books and journals held by our libraries. Our collection seems to be a strong source of material for our community members' research.

5. What else have you found? Any surprising conclusions?

My findings have shown that journals which are most highly regarded by our researchers tend to be the most well cited and most used by researchers at our institute. But it appears difficult to tell exactly what factors go into such success. For example, a publisher's marketing efforts may have an impact on how well regarded and well used a journal is.

The most surprising finding is that our researchers use online subscriptions only if we also subscribe to the same resources in print. I also found our researchers still have very little knowledge of the value of online resources like indexes and search engines.

Conducting more in-depth research however isn't on my horizon. For the near future I'll continue with my two assessment projects; simple as they may seem, they are delivering useful information. In this time of budget cuts for our libraries, metrics are appreciated. I'm glad to be contributing to efforts to determine the value of our libraries for our researchers.