Measuring the Use of Networked Electronic Journals in an Academic Library Consortium: Moving beyond MINES for Libraries® in Ontario Scholars Portal

Academic library consortia, faced with requirements of assessment and accountability, are increasingly pressured to measure the impact of their networked electronic services. Studies on usage of electronic library resources and electronic journals, in particular, proliferate; relatively few focus on the academic library consortium. This paper gives an overview of one assessment tool, MINES for Libraries®, as implemented in the Scholars Portal service of the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL). The novel contributions of this study are twofold: firstly, the creation of peer groups within an academic consortium for comparison purposes, and secondly, the use of regression analysis to explore the correlation between usage and three separate variables outside the MINES survey — library print holdings, library acquisitions budget, and sponsored research revenue.