MESUR project at LANL

[Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

Dear Ann, I thought that the attached announcement might be of 
interest to liblicense subscribers.

Greetings, herbert

_________________________________

[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