INTERVIEW
Measuring value: Web Metrics Q&A with David Stuart
David Stuart is the author of Facet’s Web Metrics for Library and Information Pro- fessionals, released in its second edition late last year. David, who is a researcher at the Centre for E-Research, King’s College London, whose research interests are in the areas of library and information management, web metrics, social media, and the semantic web. In this Q&A he looks at the value of web metrics, how things have changed and what’s next. Available
fromwww.facetpublishing.co.uk, with a discount for CILIP members.
Information Professional – Can you give us an introduction to Web Metrics.
David Stuart (DS) – Web metrics is an inclusive term to refer to the measurement of a wide range of things that can be counted on the web, and what can be counted and why they are counted varies consid- erably.
Not only can you count things such as links, follow-
ers, views, downloads, mentions, but each of these rough metrics can then be further refined: links from a particular top-level domain; views from a particular country; downloads in the past 24 hours; mentions within policy documents or with positive sentiment. The metrics may be tracked for a wide variety of purposes, from celebrating a milestone (“We’ve just had our 1,000th follower on X/Twitter!”) to improv- ing a service (“The new web design has seen web traffic fall by 25 per cent”), or merely for research purposes (“I wonder if there is a connection between online searches and unemployment and if it could be used to give an early indicator of unemployment figures”).
All this falls under web metrics.
This is a new edition of Web Metrics Library and Information Professionals – The last edi- tion was published in 2015, what has changed since then?
DS – It’s 12 years since I started writing the first edition of Web Metrics for Library and Information Professionals, and in that time there have been many
April-May 2024
Rob Green (
rob.green@
cilip.org.uk) is Editor of Information Professional
changes in web technologies, the way we use the web, the tools that are available to gather data, and the role of metrics in many institutions. For me, three of the biggest changes have change in attitude to web metrics, the tools that are available, and the increased emphasis on artificial intelligence. If the first edition said “web metrics can be useful why not have a lot”, the second edition emphasises “…but you have to use them carefully”. Increasingly we are seeing altmetrics appearing on the web pages of academics and scholarly publications, and things like policy mentions incorporated into ranking tables, how meaningful they are at this level of granulation is highly debatable. There is a need for more discern- ment in their use.
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