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U.S. academic libraries: understanding their web presence and their relationship with economic indicators

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  • Enrique Orduña-Malea

    (Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV))

  • John J. Regazzi

    (Long Island University)

Abstract

The main goal of this research is to analyze the web structure and performance of units and services belonging to U.S. academic libraries in order to check their suitability for webometric studies. Our objectives include studying their possible correlation with economic data and assessing their use for complementary evaluation purposes. We conducted a survey of library homepages, institutional repositories, digital collections, and online catalogs (a total of 374 URLs) belonging to the 100 U.S. universities with the highest total expenditures in academic libraries according to data provided by the National Center for Education Statistics. Several data points were taken and analyzed, including web variables (page count, external links, and visits) and economic variables (total expenditures, expenditures on printed and electronic books, and physical visits). The results indicate that the variety of URL syntaxes is wide, diverse and complex, which produces a misrepresentation of academic libraries’ web resources and reduces the accuracy of web analysis. On the other hand, institutional and web data indicators are not highly correlated. Better results are obtained by correlating total library expenditures with URL mentions measured by Google (r = 0.546) and visits measured by Compete (r = 0.573), respectively. Because correlation values obtained are not highly significant, we estimate such correlations will increase if users can avoid linkage problems (due to the complexity of URLs) and gain direct access to log files (for more accurate data about visits).

Suggested Citation

  • Enrique Orduña-Malea & John J. Regazzi, 2014. "U.S. academic libraries: understanding their web presence and their relationship with economic indicators," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 98(1), pages 315-336, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:98:y:2014:i:1:d:10.1007_s11192-013-1001-0
    DOI: 10.1007/s11192-013-1001-0
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Enrique Orduña-Malea & Emilio Delgado López-Cózar, 2015. "The dark side of open access in Google and Google Scholar: the case of Latin-American repositories," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 102(1), pages 829-846, January.
    2. Enrique Orduña-Malea & Rodrigo Costas, 2021. "Link-based approach to study scientific software usage: the case of VOSviewer," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(9), pages 8153-8186, September.

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