Altmetrics, qualitative understanding and the Croatian seaside

The LIDA (Libraries in the Digital Age) series of conferences,initially annual and now biannual, has become something of an institution since it was established in 2000. Its location, now in the beautiful Adriatic city of Zadar, having migrated up and down the Croatian coast over the years, is certainly one factor in its popularity. Its enthusiastic organizing team, headed by Tatjana Aparac-Jelusic and Tefko Saracevic is another. But LIDA is also notable for its choice of themes, different each time, and generally an indicator of trends and developments in library / information research.

The latest LIDA conference, held in June 2014, had as a general theme “assessment” of library / information services. While assessment and evaluation have arguably gained in importance as services have come under increased scrutiny in hard economic times, this could have been a theme for any LIDA of past years. The two sub-themes were, however, an interesting departure: qualitative methods and altmetrics. I had the pleasure of chairing with qualitative methods theme, while Blaise Cronin of Indiana University chaired altmetrics. (Since Blaise is editor of Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, this was a good conference for LIS editors.)

The extensive set of invited and contributed papers is available online, and well worth perusing. Not only do they contain a good deal of interest in their own right, but taken as a whole I suggest that they signal something of a seismic shift in research into the effectiveness of information services. While it is clear that both altmetrics and qualitative methods have some way to go in establishing a fully validated set of tools in which we can all have confidence, it seems that they now provide a valuable set of new methods and perspectives, with which to find a much clearer and holistic understanding of system effectiveness, than has been possible with traditional quantitative measures. I particularly recommend Donald Case’s presentation to the conference as a particularly insightful account of the ways in which the assessment of information use and value has changed over the years. Other presentations, all available as presentations and/or text online on the LIDA site, which I think are especially worth a look are: Elke Greifeneder’s examination of the relative contributions of qualitative and quantitative data in seeing the ‘big picture’; Cassidy Sugimoto’s critical analysis of the ‘metric menagerie’ of altmetric measures; Sheila Corral’s advocacy of the inclusion of intangible assets in evaluation of libraries; the international comparison of a model for assessing school libraries by Polona Vilar and Ivanka Strcevic; and Jeppe Nicolaisen’s interesting musings about what metrics tell us about the nature of a journal article.

This is not, of course, to say than the more traditional quantitative methods – surveys and the like – no longer have value, still less that any one method, or type of method, is superior, or sufficient on its own. It is interesting that both I, introducing the qualitative theme, and Blaise Cronin, introducing altmetrics, used the same quotation from the nineteenth century physicist Lord Kelvin, to the effect that you cannot understand, or improve, anything until you can measure it. It does seem clear, however, that our ways of measuring must become more sophisticated and multi-dimensional, and that qualitative must blend with quantitative if we are to reach full understanding. And, as I have written in a previous blog post, we should follow Václav Havel’s recommendation that we should have “a humble reverence for everything that we shall never measure”.