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Return on Context: Thomson Scientific
to Measure Content's Contextual Value |
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15 August 2005 |
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As publishers and content services wrestle with content
collection managers to prove out their slice of
institutional library budgets based on collection user
stats, Thomson Scientific is looking beyond traditional
stats to come up with measurements of how content gets used
and cited beyond the collection. While its forthcoming
Collection Development Manager may be fairly limited in
scope it's an important step towards helping collection
managers to understand the return on a content investment
in the context in which published content is most valued by
its users. Think of "return on context" as the new
measurement for weighing the total value of content to an
institution's intellectual capital - and start thinking how
you're going to be doing it some time soon. |
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The process
of collection management in corporate libraries has been a
balancing act for many a year, with librarians weighing the
"wants" of content users and librarians against perceived needs
to come up with that annual compromise - the centralized
content budget. While centralization does allow for more
cost-effective content purchasing, it relies on collection
managers understanding the importance of content in the
institution, a process that's usually neither completely
intuitive nor crystal clear. Usage statistics are the lifeblood
of this exercise and they can illuminate a collection's
importance to some degree, but what happens to content once
it's away from the bounds of centralized statistics? It gets
referenced in citation links, onpassed in emails and generally
works its way into the infrastructure of an organization. With
this kind of user behavior prevalent in organizations of all
sizes, the value of content is as much about how it returns
value in these user-driven contexts as it does in how it's
pulled off of an electronic shelf.
According to Information World Review Thomson Scientific is
one vendor with active plans to develop a solution to this
problem. Thomson Scientific is working with major university
libraries to introduce next year a new application dubbed
Collection Development Manager, a Web-based tool that will
allow collection managers to look beyond usage reports
collected from subscription management software and to peer
into content's life within the institution. The tool will take
usage data gathered from collection usage monitoring tools and
use that data as a base to look at how that content is fed into
institutional publishing and citations. Using a tool such as
this an institution can look at not only how journals were
pulled up but as well at how the value of a journal was
reflected in the creation of other intellectual assets by the
institution. Thomson and other publishers have provided for
some time publications and tools to measure journal citations
and impact in the publishing industry as a whole, but this is a
new step into institutional impact measurement.
While fairly limited in its scope of
content and analysis, this new tool represents an interesting
move towards content suppliers helping institutions to
understand the full value of a publication in an institution
beyond its virtual shelf space. Direct usage remains a very
important measurement, especially for materials such as
reference publications, but the true value of a publication is
its total impact on the intellectual capital of an institution.
In scientific literature this is a little easier to manage
given the standards and methods used to document credible
scientific research, but it's equally important in other
pursuits that consume professional content. Internal users and
distributors are content markets unto themselves, whose usage
patterns oftentimes contribute significantly to the value of a
publications.
Here are a few thoughts as to where
publishers and aggregators servicing institutional markets may
want to take measurement tools as a way of proving out the
value of a content investment in its full institutional
context:
- Think of in-context measurement as
reputation management for your own content products. With
reputation management software from vendors such as Factiva
gaining favor for churning through content to find out what
the "buzz" is on major brands and products, it's not too far
a leap of thought to think of systems measuring the impact of
content in an institution as similarly important tools for
measuring the total picture of how external content
contributes to an institution's thoughts and actions. We have
this already to some degree via knowledge management tools
designed to locate internal expertise via content analysis,
but measuring the reputation of external sources in internal
systems via these tools is fairly new ground.
- Think of how your content is
packaged to benefit from in-context analysis. Most
publishers and aggregators still think of that initial search
result and screen display as the "mission accomplished" point
of content value. But Shore's own research shows that
repurposing content is when its true value begins to unfold.
If your attitude towards redistribution is strictly a
matter of reprint rights management, then you're missing
opportunities to consider how you can encourage people to use
the most robust form of your content when its onpassed rather
than simple "cut and paste" jobs. The more content and
technology "hooks" that your content has when its onpassed
within the institution then it's more likely to be reused in
ways that analysis tools will signify as being valuable to
the institution when it shows up in new contexts.
- Think of how rich your links are
when they're cited. While the
Digital Object
Identifier system is still in its early days as a useful
tool for citation links DOIs point the way towards a
dynamically updated system of links that can mature on their
own even as their initial instances are used in new contexts.
If one is measuring the impact of a publication in an
institutional context. its ability to lead readers to other
valuable content without having to resort to new searches or
tools is quite important. Thinking of each document or page
of a document as a research tool is a concept that works
pretty well in Web portals, but more thought needs to be
given as to how those concepts can live on as content makes
its way through an institution far from its original source.
While the old "our budgets are frozen"
argument still puts downward pressure on content collections,
overall spending on institutional communications is expected to
rise smartly over the next few years, according to
the latest data from VSS. The mission of publishers and
aggregators is to take as large a part of that expanding pie as
possible and to move past arguments for the stagnation of
content's value. Building spiffy portals can close some of the
gap, but tracking more effectively just how existing content
gets used in its route through an institution is at least as
important a strategy for ensuring long-term success. Sounds
like it time to gear up for return on context as a key
measurement tool in those efforts.
-
John Blossom
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