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RK -Facilitates better management and delivery of online services. Less succinctly it provides usage information about how online services are used, a password-free environment to all online services and facilitates cost recovery for online services.

BB - Why is it important for law firms and other organisations to monitor and collect statistics on database usage?

In a nutshell: you can?t manage what you can?t measure! Without actually knowing what online services fee-earners and researchers are using, and how they?re using them, there?s no way to make an informed decision on renewals, negotiations, training, and where to focus the library?s time, effort and money.

Having solid usage information empowers the library to make better decisions and negotiations for subscription renewals. Saving money by identifying under-used services and either cancelling them, moving to individual user subscriptions, or negotiating better deals to reflect real usage. In the current economic climate, justifying your spend on well-used resources is just as important to ensure the firm doesn?t shave too much from library budgets.

More generally it means you can focus the library?s time and effort to get the most out of researcher training, current awareness work, structuring the internal portal, and so on. Usage statistics also provide concrete data to advertise how the library and online services are adding value to the firm; essential for highlighting the importance of the library within the firm.

BB - You must work with a lot of vendors, who to some degree provide their own statistics, how do they feel about organisations additionally using Research Monitor?

Initially some vendors are a little cautious about Research Monitor providing usage statistics, but most recognise that transparency is necessary and if they have confidence in their service then it should be a good thing for them. Research Monitor generally provides much more detailed information, and integrates firm data like practice group to enable useful analysis.

At the end of the day we don?t require a formal relationship with the information vendors, so in cases where they?re not keen on firms knowing how researchers use their services we?re still able to provide detailed and useful information.

BB - Can you provide a real life example of an organisation that has saved money by using Research Monitor?

Several firms have ceased subscriptions for services that were seldom used, but it is also important to remember that Research Monitor provides benefits that are slightly less tangible: negotiating with the larger vendors is more effective with detailed statistics; providing a password-free environment to online services means fee-earners waste less time entering (and forgetting) logins.

We have at least one firm at the moment using Research Monitor to carefully plan moving from using both Westlaw and Lexis to just a single service for the firm. This will result in significant annual savings.

BB - Isn't monitoring an individual fee-earners' use of a database a bit "big brother" like?

I think it largely depends on which databases you are monitoring and what the objective is. It is important to note that we mostly deal with online legal databases and journals, these are services the firms pays for and the objective is to help the firm and individual fee-earners get maximum benefit from them. It?s reasonable to keep a record of how they?re used to ensure the firm gets the most out of them. Provided researchers understand the services are monitored ? which is probably already the IT policy generally for email and internet use ? there?s no real issue.

BB - Finally, are you looking forward to presenting and have you attended a BIALL Conference before?

I am excited. It?s my first time at a BIALL Conference and I hear they?re a lot of fun.

The BIALL Conference...fun...okay who let that cat out of the bag? Many thanks to Rory for his answers, there is certainly plenty here for BIALL members to think about!

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