Assessment:Benefits

How best can we measure the benefits of digital libraries?

Potential steps to establish best practices and guidelines may include the following:

1. Create operational definitions of value for digital libraries in general
2. Assess alignment of benefits with institutional goals
3. Develop standardized methods, comparable across institutions, to measure the benefits

The latter might include:

 * Altmetrics
 * Citations
 * Web stats and Google Analytics
 * Other measurements and methods (such as surveys, focus groups)
 * Address special challenges raised by aggregation

There is a new NISO effort to begin to standardize altmetrics, which we hope to both inform and leverage to our benefit!

We have formed a working group on Assessment:Citations Citations and another on analytics, that we hope will have progress to share at the next DLF Forum!

If you are interested in helping us develop best practices and guidelines for measuring benefits of digital libraries, please join our Digital Library Assessment Google Group and speak up!  :-)