The Hindu Business Line : Usage report service for libraries

While libraries around the world have been undergoing huge transition to provide content to users in electronic format, it is still in a nascent stage in India. The situation could change dramatically in the next two to three years, opines Ms Martha Sedwick, Product Manager, ScholarlyStats.

ScholarlyStats incidentally is usage data gathering service from the MPS Technologies stable. The service provides libraries across the globe with consolidated vendor usage statistics by collecting, standardising and consolidating journal and database usage reports.

According to Ms Sedwick, it is the first service to provide libraries with a single view of their vendor usage statistics, allowing librarians to save time compiling data but spend time on analysis and acting on the results.

The President of MPS Technologies, Mr. Ravi Singh, however attributes the slow takeoff in library digitization to higher cost and relatively poor Internet penetration, compared to the advanced nations.

Ms Sedwick was in India recently. Sharing her views on digitisation of information in libraries, she said the e-publishing industry was growing at a rapid pace and this was being replicated in the Indian market as well, where it recorded a 15 per cent growth year-on-year. `As this new spend puts enormous pressure on library budgets, choosing the right content becomes vital and the challenge is in understanding the way users access the content,' she explained.

The company has initiated dialogue with a large number of libraries in India to create awareness about its products. It works with publishers on such digitisation projects and the model, she said, was different from those offered by its competitors.

In addition to BookStore and ScholarlyStats, the company's products include Web analytics and fulfillment service.

On the level of transformation, she said only about 5 per cent of the journals were published in the electronic format.