Digital Impacts: How to Measure and Understand the Usage and Impact of Digital Content

The question of how we can measure and understand the usage and impact of digital content within the education sector is becoming increasingly important. Substantial investment goes into the creation of digital resources for research, teaching and learning and, in the current economic climate, both content creators, publishers as well as funding bodies are being asked to provide evidence of the value of the resources they’ve invested in.

But how do we go about defining value and impact? Which metrics should we adopt to understand usage? When is a digital resource a well used resource?

This one-day event explores these and other key issues and showcase the work of the JISC-funded Impact and Embedding of Digitised Resources programme.

The workshop is aimed at:

• content creators and publishers
• Information professionals and content managers in charge of maintaining and developing digital collections
• librarians, archivists and institutional staff involved in digitisation efforts
• researchers and research directors interested in learning about alternative methods of measuring impact
• representatives of funding and evaluation bodies
• early career researchers concerned about ways of demonstrating the impact of their online activities
• those interested in understanding the impact of distributing materials online

This event builds on previous JISC-funded work carried out by the Oxford Internet Institute in 2008-2009, which produced a toolkit describing best practice in methods for evaluating usage and impact of digital resources (TIDSR). JISC has recently funded seven projects as part of the Impact and Embedding of Digitised Resources programme to use this toolkit to understand and improve their impact, and has also funded a synthesis report combining the results of those projects with other related evidence on the impacts of digital resources. With these and other developments, the Oxford Internet Institute feels that the timing is right to highlight these issues, to present new research data and findings, and to promote discussion of a number of important themes arising in the impacts of digital materials.

Other recordings from this session:

Impact and Embedding of Digitised Resources

Tools for Measuring the Impact of Digitised Resources

The Impact of Digital Content: Reflections