Assessment:Altmetrics
How can we best utilize altmetrics for digital libraries?
"Determining Assessment Strategies for Digital Libraries and Institutional Repositories Using Usage Statistics and Altmetrics" by Stacy Konkiel, Michelle Dalmau and Dave Scherer begins to lay out some initial best practices for altmetrics (http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1392140).
According to them, altmetrics should be:
- Transparently collected and displayed
- Auditable (in a manner similar to COUNTER metrics)
- Appropriate to the medium being measured
- Include context (via percentiles, demographic information, etc)
- Open data (freely available and thereby auditable and also available for reuse under as permissive a license as possible)
There is a new NISO effort to begin to standardize altmetrics, which we hope to both inform and leverage to our benefit!
If you are interested in helping us develop best practices and guidelines for assessing altmetrics for digital libraries, please join our Digital Library Assessment Google Group and speak up! :-)