A Journal Usage Analysis During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Serials Trends and Implications

Abstract

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic had wide-reaching effects throughout all of society. For libraries, this often translated to a quick pivot to support activities that moved to almost-exclusively online and remote for all patrons. Although the LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans Library was somewhat unique in that it never closed during the 2020 height of the pandemic, the majority of its patrons were accessing its resources remotely. Spurred by local anecdotal evidence journal usage had surprisingly declined at a significant rate during 2020, this study aims to determine whether this decline could be demonstrated through statistical analysis of COUNTER 5 usage reports for 2019 and 2020 for a sampling of titles. It also illustrates how COUNTER statistics may provide just a window of overall serials use.

Keywords:

• Analyses
• COUNTER 5
• COVID-19
• electronic resources
• journals
• paired t-test
• pandemics
• Serials
• statistics
• univariate linear regression

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Bourgeois

John P. Bourgeois is now at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University.