Web Metrics for Library and Information Professionals
Online Information Review · 2015
From the beginning of time, measurement has been part of the essence of being human, whether consciously or unconsciously.The purposes for which we measure, as summarized by Behn (2003) and duly cited by Stuart in the introduction to his book, are enlightening in themselves: to evaluate, to check, to budget, to motivate, to promote, to celebrate, to learn, and to improve.Humans, whether they are involved in scientific or non-scientific activity, need to measure in order to know.Advances in instrumentation, coupled with the development of applied statistics, have heralded genuine revolutions in the collection, measurement and analysis of empirical data in different academic disciplines.The development of new instruments of measurement, such as the telescope or microscope, allowed us to observe what we could not see before.They also led to the design of new data collection procedures for new entities and attributes.Information and communication technologies have enabled instruments of measurement to capture human beings in their social aspect, in an entirely personalized fashion.At the dawn of the Internet age, quantitative analysis -performed through rudimentary tools -only allowed us to sketch out a small part of human activity, reflected through web activity.In this way, a quantitative analysis of websites allowed us to determine, in a manner that was somewhat elementary but of undoubted public interest, the established relationships between different actors (especially institutions and companies) in different languages and on various subjects, through a set of web indicators that webometric techniques helped design, implement, test and improve by means of countless research works.