The social sciences: who won the '90s in scholarly book publishing

The study of prizes awarded to books in the 1990s by leading social sciences scholarly associations helps us understand the disciplines, publishing, and libraries during that decade. This article examines data on prizewinners of the American Anthropological Association, the American Educational Research Association, the Association of American Geographers, the American Political Science Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Sociological Association. For the prizewinners, it reports the distribution of winners among publishers and universities; the extent of cross-disciplinary publishing; the degree of coauthorship; trends in library acquisitions of print versions; and accessibility of electronic versions. The University of Chicago Press ranked first among publishers, and the faculty at Harvard won more prizes than did faculty at any other institution. Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal classifications assigned to the winners show substantial cross-disciplinary interest. Sixteen percent of the books were coauthored. Library print holdings appeared to decline over the decade by approximately 20 percent and in April 2004, 19 percent of prizewinners were available electronically

The humanities: who won the '90s in scholarly book publishing

The study of prizes awarded to books in the 1990s by leading humanities scholarly associations tells much about the disciplines, publishing, and libraries during that decade. This article examines data on prize-winners of the American Historical Association, the American Musicological Society, the College Art Association, and the Modern Language Association. For the prize-winners, it reports the distribution of winners among publishers and universities; extent of cross-disciplinary publishing; degree of co-authorship; trends in library acquisitions of print versions; and accessibility of electronic versions. The University of California Press and the faculty at the university’s Berkeley campus ranked first; the American Historical Association awarded nearly half of its prizes to books classified outside history; there was little co-authorship; library holdings appeared to decline over the decade; and roughly 15% of prize winners were available through netLibrary by the summer of 2001

Time and technology: a decade-long look at humanists' use of electronic information technology

A ten-year study of a group of humanists reveals that temporal factors had a significant impact on their adoption of electronic information technology. This article identifies and describes four types of time that influence humanists’ behavior. Three are types of time spent: anticipated start-up time, actual start-up time, and use time; the fourth is time of life, that is, the stage of a scholar’s project or career. Because it is closely related to use of time, this article also discusses how content of electronic resources that a scholar might use affects adoption of electronic information technology. Librarians who are sensitive to humanists’ temporal considerations can better help them utilize technology

Publication patterns of U.S. academic librarians from 1998 to 2002

This study examines the contributions of U.S. academic librarians to the peer-reviewed literature of library and information science (LIS). Compared to the authors’ study of 32 journals for 1993-1997, the present study finds that for 1998-2002, there were declines in the total number of refereed articles (almost 4%), number of refereed articles by academic librarians (almost 13%), proportion of refereed articles by academic librarians (just over 4%), proportion of academic librarian authors (almost 3%), and proportion of co-authored articles by academic librarians (almost 4%). Because different factors influence rates of authorship in a given set of journals and these rates tend to fluctuate in the short term, only further investigation can assess whether the declines are momentary or the start of a trend. Approximately 7% of academic librarians wrote 3 or more articles. The 20 most productive libraries published more than 10% of all refereed articles in the 32 journals and nearly one-third of the articles by academic librarians

Publication patterns of U.S. academic librarians from 1993 to 1997

This study examined the contribution to the peer-reviewed literature of library and information science by practicing academic librarians in the United States. Data on authors were obtained from articles published from 1993 to 1997 in thirty-two journals. Of 3,624 peer-reviewed articles in these journals, 1,579 (43.6%) were authored by at least one practicing academic librarian. These librarians represented 386 institutions of higher education. This study provides benchmark data for publication productivity of academic librarians and identifies a core list of peer-reviewed journals for them. Approximately six percent of these librarians wrote three or more articles in the five-year period. In nineteen journals one-third or more of the articles were authored by academic librarians. Libraries from Research I universities that were members of the Association for Research Libraries were the most productive. The contribution of practicing academic librarians to the literature of their field is significant

The measurement of use of web-based information resources: an early look at vendor-supplied data

To manage Web-based resources effectively, librarians need to evaluate vendor-supplied data about their use. This article explores the types of data available, using as its starting point the elements defined by the International Coalition of Library Consortia's (ICOLC) "Guidelines for Statistical Measures of Usage of Web-based Indexed, Abstracted, and Full-text Resources." It discusses the problems and issues of comparing use data from different vendors. Then, illustrated with data from one library, the article addresses five measures that have implications for collection management: variability of ICOLC data elements over time, which demonstrated the need to examine data continually; ratios of queries per session, which showed more stability over time than individual ICOLC elements; use by hour, which documented remote use but confirmed that most use occurred during regular library hours; use of electronic journal collections, which was more scattered than the classic 80/20 distribution; and use of Web-based resources in relation to a disciplinary population, which provided an index of value for assessing use of a particular resource. This study identifies aspects of data collection that librarians need to pay special attention to, recommends that vendors report the maximum number of simultaneous users per day and data gaps in addition to ICOLC elements, and suggests per capita use as a comparative measure among libraries

Measurement of use of electronic resources: advances in use statistics and innovations in resource functionality

The ICOLC guidelines and Project COUNTER codes of practice have advanced the measurement of use of electronic resources. At the same time, innovations in functionality within and among electronic resources are changing the environment in which use is measured. The present article explores measures of sessions and searches for one research library’s electronic resources. The article analyzes the transition from vendor-specific to COUNTER-compliant statistics, how vendors measure the running of search alerts, and the effects of federated searching on reported use. The analysis suggests that innovations in functionality may have changed the meaning of sessions and searches. The analysis also suggests the following principle: innovations in electronic resource functionality will necessitate advances in electronic resource usage measures to describe use meaningfully