Libraries spend millions on electronic journal licences every year, but it has never been easy to gather statistics about how these resources are used.

We're working with JISC Collections, Evidence Base and Cranfield University to develop the Journal Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP), a new project that will provide libraries – and librarians – with a simpler way of analysing the usage and impact of their e-journal subscriptions.

Developing the portal

As diminishing budgets force university libraries to tighten their belts, it's becoming increasingly important to demonstrate that resources are value for money.

We know that obtaining meaningful and comparable data about the usage of electronic journals (e-journals) is important because it informs decisions about title renewals as well as the value of expensive subscriptions. Currently, however, the process for gathering this information is difficult, with librarians having to contact publishers directly and download statistical reports from different sources.

With this in mind, in 2008, JISC Collections asked us to work with Evidence Base to develop a 'one-stop shop' where libraries could go to view and download their own usage reports from selected scholarly publishers in the JISC NESLi2 initiative.

A working prototype was developed in 2008/09, in collaboration with Cranfield University. We initially worked with three publishers (Elsevier, Oxford University Press and Springer) and five university libraries (Birmingham, Cranfield, Glasgow, Liverpool and Westminster).

Publishers and libraries involved in the project have responded extremely positively:

"This is indeed really a milestone on its way. Congratulations with the project so far."

"It's exactly what all stats librarians need and a very positive step in the right direction for data collection."

Saving the community time and money

JUSP, set to go into full production in October 2010, will allow librarians to:

• see which journals have low and high usage
• view trends of usage over time
• separate back-file or archive collection usage
• collect usage data in the form of COUNTER-compliant JR1, JR1A and JR5 reports
• complete their annual SCONUL returns for titles provided by the NESLi2 publishers

This extra information will help with the promotion and placement of titles, providing hard facts that can be used when considering future deals or analysing which journals are most important to a library's user base. This will be a huge benefit to the community, with just one site to visit rather than, potentially, dozens.

And the cost benefits are not just restricted to libraries. JISC Collections and its negotiators will be able to employ the usage reports to inform future negotiations with publishers. Also, the type of data provided by the JUSP Project will be important to those publishers set to move to usage-based deals.

Future plans

The portal is set to expand significantly over the next 18 months. We'll be adding the option to compare the usage of differently-priced journals by including cost information for each title; users will also be able to break down titles by subject area. And we'd like to expand the range of materials by working with book titles, databases and additional publishers.

Also, we'll be implementing the Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) protocol, which will automatically gather usage statistics from publisher websites – saving our users even more time and effort.

We're all too well aware that these are financially challenging times, but with more institutions set to participate in the JUSP Project, we hope that the portal will become an invaluable tool for libraries and other academic institutions.

Visit the JUSP Project website to read more about the work as it develops.