Uses of Necessity or Uses of Convenience? What Usage Statistics Reveal and Conceal About Electronic Serials

The standardization and assessment of processes related to managing electronic resources have necessarily lagged a few years behind the inception of such processes. As an example, electronic journals (e-journals) had been available for several years before Nancy Olson&s;s Cataloging Internet Resources was published in 1995. 1 Until the publication of Olson&s;s seminal text, pioneering catalogers developed uncoordinated local practices within the construct of AACR2 and MARC to provide bibliographic description for these elusive resources. Several years before the Digital Library Federation (DLF) commissioned Tim Jewell of the University of Washington to investigate management issues associated with electronic resources, many academic libraries had been recording administrative metadata about e-resources within spreadsheets and homegrown databases. As a result of Jewell&s;s study, the DLF sponsored the Electronic Resource Management Initiative (ERMI) to investigate the needs of libraries with respect to electronic resources. The final report of the ERMI group, two years in the making, was released in August 2004. 2 It contained detailed, comprehensive specifications that identified the elements, values, and relationships that formed the foundation of e-resource administration. Functional specifications 40.1 through 40.7 are devoted to usage statistics, one of the next important challenges for libraries.