Making Usage Data Meaningful

This article reports the findings of a study of licensed database usage among libraries in the NC LIVE consortium. Researchers developed North Carolina-based library peer groups in order to build context for libraries' usage data reports and to identify benchmarks and trends across those libraries that are top performers within each group. Additionally, researchers examined the use of selected databases across multiple library types to determine whether certain library characteristics or activities are related to database use. Researchers found that a number of library characteristics and activities predict database use, but the results vary depending upon the type of library and the database studied.