Cost Per User: Analyzing EZProxy Logs for Assessment

Cost per use has long been a staple of collection development decision‐making for electronic resources, but what of the users behind those retrieval and search counts? Questions about the interdisciplinary usage of an e‐resource, the depth of integration into a given program or course, and who will miss it if it is cancelled are generally relegated to the realm of anecdotal evidence. Researchers at Nevada State College have made efforts to remedy this gap in knowledge by analyzing EZProxy logs, which can be set up to capture unique user identifiers at the point of authentication into library electronic resources. When matched with institutional data about those users, this data can answer questions such as cost per user, percent of users within the institution as a whole or a specific department, and frequency and depth of use for the average user. Ultimately, librarians can even discover if library users have higher GPAs or make better grades on research assignments. This paper will provide a summary of the work of the research team at Nevada State College, currently in the midst of their first year of EZProxy log analysis.