Economics and usage of a corporate digital library

This paper analyses the usage made of the journals and books offered by the BT Digital Library, looking in detail at the usage of the 3,500 people at BT’s development site at Adastral Park, near Ipswich, and the impact of this usage on purchase decisions in the library. The Digital Library offers over 800 electronic journals to its user community. Journals are held on the Library server, where possible, with the Library now offering the IEEE’s IEL, Bell & Howell Information & Learning ProQuest collections and selected Elsevier journals, supplemented by links to publishers’ web sites for other titles. The Digital Library has recently begun to introduce electronic books, with the offering of twenty O’Reilly books. During 1999, 1,091 users from this site read journal articles on the Digital Library. A total 9,108 papers were read 12,919 times. This is a somewhat lower level of repeat usage of articles than that reported by Mackie-Mason, et al. In their discussion of the usage patterns in the PEAK experiment’s generalised subscription model, a usage level of 2.6 accesses per article is reported compared with 1.4 accesses in BT. The difference may reflect different reading patterns of corporate library users or of software engineers to more general academic communities. The concentration of usage by journal within the IEEE’s IEL collection and the selection of Elsevier journals available in the Digital Library has been analysed. IEL showed a high concentration with 21% of titles delivering 80% of the articles read. The Library’s Elsevier collection showed a much lower concentration, with half (ten) of the titles needed to deliver 80% of the articles read. The ProQuest collection has not been available long enough for a similar analysis to be carried out. Usage throughout 1999 was relatively static with peaks in March and October. Accesses per potential user were between 0.25 and 0.35 a month, higher than those reported in the PEAK experiment. Electronic access to journals is supplemented by a document delivery system so that users can request documents not available online. The system detects when requests are made for documents that are not yet available online, but will become available in the future. Users get the choice of being added to the waiting list to be alerted when the article becomes available online rather than go ahead with the request for a photocopy. A significant number of users choose to wait for the online version, even though they could have a copy of the desired article almost immediately and without extra monetary cost to themselves.