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Tag: usage

Open Access metadata, Part Two

This blog post was written in collaboration with Jeff Edmunds, Digital Access Coordinator at the Penn State University Libraries. It’s a companion piece to the original blog post, ‘Open Access metadata: OAPEN partners with Penn State University Libraries’.

This blog post was written in collaboration with Jeff Edmunds, Digital Access Coordinator at the Penn State University Libraries. It’s a companion piece to the original blog post, ‘Open Access metadata: OAPEN partners with Penn State University Libraries’ (linked below).  

In October of 2023, OAPEN announced a collaboration with Penn State University Libraries whereby OAPEN’s metadata was being transformed into MARC records, cleaned up and improved, and then made freely available for download (with a CC license assigned) via Penn State’s institutional repository, ScholarSphere. 

Since September 2023, the MARC files have been downloaded hundreds of times (averaging 200-300 times per month) from many parts of the globe. The visualization below demonstrates exactly how far and wide these MARC files have been downloaded. 

Downloads have originated from 40 distinct countries, with the breakdown by continent as follows: 

  • North America: 50.8%
  • Europe: 32.4% 
  • Asia: 12.5% 
  • Oceania: 2% 
  • Africa: 1.8% 
  • South America: 0.5% 

We are delighted to see such a global reach. This shows how the OAPEN Library is truly a global library, committed to fostering a more equitable scholarly communications infrastructure, and what we can achieve when we collaborate with libraries such as Penn State, who are also dedicated to sharing  knowledge and new ideas with the world. The statistics also give us the opportunity to improve our outreach to libraries in areas of the globe that are not taking full advantage of the freely available metadata, beyond those that are covered in the image. 

Now that the MARC records have been available for several months, Penn State has been able to improve its processing thanks to feedback from members of the OAPEN and DOAB Library Working Group, specifically Erik Lindgren (Information Specialist at the Turku University Library, Finland) and Emma Booth (Metadata Manager for Content Management, University of Manchester Library, UK). 

Given the success of this collaboration, OAPEN and Penn State University Libraries are discussing the possibility of implementing a similar process for the metadata available from DOAB for its corpus of nearly 80,000 open access titles. 

The OAPEN MARC files are updated monthly and currently describe over 33,000 open access titles. 

Silke Davison

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Books in a bubble

Nowadays, we refer to “bubbles” as online places where no information from outside is allowed in. But in this instance, the opposite is true: the bubbles are a tool to help visualise how well one set of books is performing, compared to other sets of books. The OAPEN Library is an open online platform, and recently we have audited ourselves, based on the POSI principles. However, apart from an infrastructure, it is also a library.

When our collection passed the 20,000 titles milestone, we felt it was time to assess our collection: how well does it perform? That is not a simple question to answer: assessments of libraries and their collections are taking place within a certain context. OAPEN is not a ‘traditional’ library with a mixed collection of physical and digital publications, and our collection criteria are perhaps a bit different: books should be peer reviewed and have an open license, but we welcome all languages and subjects. We are not linked to one ‘parent organisation’, but try to serve everybody.

Three types of stakeholders support the OAPEN Library: publishers, funders and libraries. Both publishers and funders contribute to the collection by making publications available. They will be interested in the dissemination of the books and chapters. For libraries, the composition of the collection will be paramount. How do the titles on offer fit within the information needs of their patrons?

The evaluation of the OAPEN collection should consider these two aspects. The dissemination of books and chapters is measured through the number of downloads – based on COUNTER R5 conformant data. The composition of the collection is measured among two axes: subject and language. Both dissemination and the content-related aspects are paired to the number of publications. So, we have to take into account three dimensions: number of titles, number of downloads and average downloads per title. On top of that, we need to look at the differences between languages and subjects. All in all, a complex mix.

Our solution was to use three-dimensional pictures: the bubbles.

Usage of social sciences books depicted as three-dimensional bubbles
Social sciences in the OAPEN Library collection

The bubbles display the composition of the collection and how its readers make use of it. Visualisations like this help to tell a complicated story in a simple way; a powerful instrument to guide the further development of the OAPEN Library.

More details can be found in this open access article:

Snijder, Ronald. ‘Books in a Bubble.: Assessing the OAPEN Library Collection’. JLIS.It 14, no. 2 (15 May 2023): 75–92. https://doi.org/10.36253/jlis.it-498.

Ronald Snijder

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