MESUR: metrics from scholarly usage of resources

Usage data is increasingly regarded as a valuable resource in the assessment of scholarly communication items. However, the development of quantitative, usage-based indicators of scholarly impact is still in its infancy. The Digital Library Research & Prototyping Team at the Los Alamos National Laboratory's Research library has therefore started a program to expand the set of usage-based tools for the assessment of scholarly communication items. The two-year MESUR project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, aims to define and validate a range of usage-based impact metrics, and issue guidelines with regards to their characteristics and proper application. The MESUR project is constructing a large-scale semantic model of the scholarly community that seamlessly integrates a wide range of bibliographic, citation and usage data. Functioning as a reference data set, this model is analyzed to characterize the intricate networks of typed relationships that exist in the scholarly community. The resulting characterizations guide a program for the definition and validation of usage-based impact metrics. This lecture will provide an overview of MESUR's progress so far, followed by a discussion of the architecture and standards that MESUR has adopted. The results of a preliminary analysis of the generated model will be discussed. The lecture will conclude with an overview of MESUR's future activities and expected outcomes.