MESUR project at LANL

[Johan Bollen]

-- My apologies for multiple postings --

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.  Project 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>

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Johan Bollen
Los Alamos National Laboratory (P362-proto)
Los Alamos, NM 87545
Ph: 505 606 0030, Fx: 505 665 6452
jbollen at lanl.gov, http://public.lanl.gov/jbollen
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