2015 Charleston Library Conference

The landscape around alternative metrics has been evolving rapidly. Going from a twitter hashtag in 2011 to a key component in research evaluation at many institutions, metrics that move beyond citation counts and journal impact factor are here to stay.

Metrics can now be harvested and applied to research around usage, captures, mentions, and social media, in addition to citations, giving a much more comprehensive and holistic view of impact. These new metrics are also much more timely than citation metrics and can keep pace with new formats much faster than the entrenched, legacy practices.

However, as institutions begin to utilize these more modern metrics, they often lead to surprising pathways of discovery and uses beyond what they had originally envisioned.

In this panel discussion, Ashley Lowery, Digital Collections Specialist at Georgia Southern University, John McDonald, Associate Dean of Collections for USC Libraries, and Andrea Michalek, President and Co-Founder of Plum Analytics, will discuss the trends in this space, examples of how altmetrics are used in practice, and the somewhat surprising outcomes that they have seen.

The attendees will have ample time to ask questions of the expert panel, and will leave with session with a better understanding of how their university could begin to take advantage of these new metrics, and some of the pitfalls to avoid.