IACRL poster_final

Value of the Online Newspaper Collection at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library Kirk Hess and Sarah Hoover University Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Results 800

Newspaper Article Requests by Vendor, 2012-2013 Issues Read

100000

80000

600 500 400 300 200 100

60000

EbscoHost Gale LexisNexis NewsBank ProQuest

40000

20000

0

Title Usage by Vendor, 2012-2013

Dec-13

Nov-13

Oct-13

Sep-13

Aug-13

Jul-13

Jun-13

May-13

Apr-13

Mar-13

Feb-13

Jan-13

Dec-12

Nov-12

Oct-12

Sep-12

Aug-12

Jul-12

Jun-12

May-12

Apr-12

Mar-12

0

Jan-12

Successful Full-Text Article Requests

This analysis collected information on utility at the vendor and title levels for a two-year period from 2012 through 2013 in order to investigate the question of how University of Illinois users access content from the electronic newspaper collection.

Utility results revealed that a small number of titles drove the use for almost each of the vendors. In addition, many of the most-used titles appear to have been part of data mining activity, in particular titles from Newsbank Access World News during 2012.

700

120000

The University Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign licenses or owns over 10k current and historical electronic newspaper titles through five main vendors—EbscoHost, Gale, LexisNexis, Newsbank, and ProQuest, including the Library PressDisplay platform. Yet there are thousands more newspapers available electronically through these and other vendors, and we do not have a reliable way to measure the value of an individual newspaper to our campus.

Conclusions

PressDisplay Total Usage, 2012-2013

Feb-12

Introduction and Research Questions

Databases included in analysis: •EbscoHost Newspaper Source •Gale Academic OneFile, Opposing Viewpoints in Context, and Biography in Context (newspapers and newswires) •LexisNexis Academic (news sources) •Newsbank—Access World News, Archives of America, and World Newspaper Archive •ProQuest (historical newspapers, newspapers, and newswires)

Several vendors included a large number of titles that were never used. EbscoHost had the highest percentage of titles used, but out of a small number of titles. PressDisplay had the lowest usage for the number of titles that are included. The library was able to implement a new set of newspaper results for its Easy Search discovery tool based on usage information from this study, including highlighting popular titles and frequently-used vendors.

PressDisplay 2013

Top 10 Titles out of Total Requests, 2012

PressDisplay 2012

Methods

ProQuest 2013 ProQuest 2012

Utility was measured through reports of full-text article requests in 2012 and 2013. Most vendors provided COUNTER JR1 reports, except for LexisNexis, which provided its own article-level statistics, and PressDisplay, which is tracked by issues read rather than by article.

Newsbank 2013

San Jose Mercury News (CA) San Mateo County Times (CA)

Newsbank 2012

The New York Times Wall Street Journal Chicago Tribune

Gale 2013

PR Newswire Chicago Defender

Gale 2012

Business Wire Washington Post

EbscoHost 2013

Financial Times (London) All other titles

For title-level information, data on usage for the mostrequested titles was compiled from all of the selected vendor databases, bringing together separate data points for print and online versions as well as different coverage ranges within ProQuest Historical Newspapers. LexisNexis includes a number of aggregated sets of titles in its data reporting. Many of our most-used newspaper titles are also included as part of these sets, but there is no specific usage information available for individual titles within the set. For example, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times are included in the 500+ title category “Major World Publications,” which had over 11,000 article requests in 2012 and over 31,000 in 2013.

EbscoHost 2012 0

2000

4000

Titles with 2 or more requests

6000

Titles with 1 request

8000

10000

Titles with 0 requests

*Source of data for total titles varies by vendor; some title counts post-date the year of usage, thus making the total number of titles with 0 requests an approximation. An accurate count of total titles was not available for LexisNexis.

Top 10 Titles out of Total Requests, 2013

Most Used Newspaper Titles

Wall Street Journal New York Times

140000

Chicago Defender Financial Times (London)

Successful Full-Text Article Requests

For vendor-level information, databases were chosen for analysis based on their inclusion of sources for news content; however, some of these databases also include a large amount of non-news content. LexisNexis, for example, also has legal and business information, and the ProQuest and Gale databases analyzed include scholarly journals and other material types. For Gale and ProQuest, data was compared with title lists by publication type to filter results to newspapers and newswires. For LexisNexis, the most-used non-news business and legal sources were removed from the analysis.

Chicago Tribune

120000

PR Newswire Washington Post Los Angeles Times

100000

State Journal-Register (Springfield, IL)

Next steps

News-Gazette (Champaign-Urbana, IL) 80000

Our next step is to use this information to develop a weighted value algorithm to rank titles and aggregators as a tool for collection development and recommend acquisition of new content. We plan to use a three-factor algorithm that combines the usage data collected in this study with cost information and an assigned value for quality to each title.

All other titles

60000

40000

20000

0

San Jose San Jose San Mateo San Mateo The New The New Wall Street Wall Street Mercury Mercury County County York Times York Times Journal Journal News (CA) News (CA) Times (CA) Times (CA) 2012 2013 2012 2013 2012 2013 2012 2013 ProQuest Historical ProQuest NewsBank LexisNexis Gale EbscoHost

33532 128927 10

42

113

83

86748

1

27511

2412 28533

5

1

17655 6964 5

5455 6005 4

1821 81118

Chicago Tribune 2012

Chicago Tribune 2013

24543 3259 231

13628 2536 106

PR Newswire 2012

7589 472 833 67

PR Newswire 2013

5633 401 52 442

Chicago Defender 2012

Chicago Defender 2013

7078 1857 6

17035 305 4

Business Wire 2012

Business Washington Washington Wire 2013 Post 2012 Post 2013 6176

7584 455

3180 321 430 51 454

5298 114 358 119 379

Financial Times (London, England) 2012

Financial Times (London, England) 2013

1511 4274 240 270

16537 108 50 382

The study revealed some problems that would need to be remediated to fully compare online newspaper titles and collections, such as reconciling the overlap in title lists between vendors. We also uncovered other variables that should be evaluated in our factors such as the impact of discovery and link resolver systems.