[OAI-general] MESUR project at LANL

[Herbert Van de Sompel]

[Apologies for cross-posting]

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funds two-year LANL project for the 
development of metrics derived from scholarly usage data.

Los Alamos, New Mexico, November 6th 2006 - The Andrew W. Mellon 
Foundation has awarded funding to Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) 
in support of the two-year MESUR project that will investigate metrics 
derived from the network-based usage of scholarly information. The 
Digital Library Research & Prototyping Team of the LANL Research Library 
will carry out the project. Johan Bollen is the Principal Investigator, 
Herbert Van de Sompel serves as an architectural consultant, and Aric 
Hagberg of the LANL Mathematical Modeling and Analysis group serves as 
modeling consultant. Marko A. Rodriguez, PhD student at the University 
of California Santa Cruz and LANL Graduate Research Assistant, supports 
the project's research and development.

The project's major objective is enriching the toolkit used for the 
assessment of the impact of scholarly communication items, and hence of 
scholars, with metrics that derive from usage data. The project will 
start with the creation of a semantic model of scholarly communication, 
and an associated large-scale semantic store that relates a range of 
scholarly bibliographic, citation and usage data obtained from a variety 
of sources.  Next, an investigation into the definition and validation 
of usage-based metrics will be conducted on the basis of this 
comprehensive collection. Finally, the defined metrics will be 
cross-validated, resulting in the formulation of guidelines and 
recommendations for future applications of metrics derived from 
scholarly usage data.  Projects results will be made public on the 
project's web site <http://www.mesur.org/>.

The MESUR project currently has an open position for a software 
developer; a job description is available at 
<http://www.mesur.org/Jobs.html>.

-- 
Herbert Van de Sompel
Digital Library Research & Prototyping
Los Alamos National Laboratory, Research Library
http://public.lanl.gov/herbertv/
tel. +1 505 667 1267