Statistics Show Increasing Use of New Civil War Digital Resources by Students, Faculty, and Researchers

Increasing access to unique and educationally valuable research resources for a broad spectrum of users, including Ball State students, faculty, and other researchers world-wide, is the primary goal for the Digital Media Repository (DMR).

Evidence of success in achieving this goal can be seen in the use of the U.S. Civil War resources from East Central Indiana, http://libx.bsu.edu/LSTA/LSTACivWar.html, that have been added to the DMR since February 2006. These digital resources were made possible by a Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) digitization grant that the University Libraries received for 2005-2006.

The usage statistics for the first two Civil War collections (available in February 2006)show that the two collections were accessed 5,818 times in February. Most of the use was on campus with 5,007 compared to 811 from off campus. While more collections were added in March and April, the statistics show a slight decline in use for those months. Some of the decline may be attributable to a lack of publicizing the collections while they were being developed.

In May 2006, a dramatic increase can be seen in use to 13,179 hits. Once again, the statistics show the largest number of uses by students and faculty on campus: 12,410 hits. By this time, all of the collections that were available had been publicized, and the resources had been used in some junior high school classes.

Looking at the total use of these research materials from February through May 2006, the statistics show 28,105 hits. When the numbers are divided by the individual collections, Archives and Special Collections materials account for 34% of the use.

These statistics provide evidence that the digital copies of the original Civil War documents in these collections reached a larger number of users in just four months than typically would have been possible in several years if researchers had to visit the various sites in person to examine the items. The availability and ease of access to these materials provided via the Web in the DMR made the increased use possible.

Visit the Digital Media Repository, http://libx.bsu.edu