As its title suggests, the aim of this book is to provide library and information professionals with a comprehensive and practical guide to web metrics and demonstrate the value they can add to their work, and it does a fine job of both.
Web metrics is a much broader term than (and should not be confused with) web analytics. In the author’s words, web metrics refers to the “quantitative measurement of the creation and use of web content”. The definition is nicely illustrated by a diagram in Chapter 2 showing the different types of web metrics used in library and information science – informetrics, bibliometrics, altmetrics, scientometrics, web analytics – and how they intersect.
The nine chapters of the book are logically arranged. Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the aim of web metrics and the structure of the book. Chapter 2 sets the scene with a thorough discussion on the different types of web metrics, distinguishing between relational and evaluative metrics and illustrating how they can be used. One example cites how the growth of scientific domains can be evaluated by using basic web metrics such as hits, referrers, and paths; another shows how relational link analysis can be performed to investigate the depth of relationship among academic or scientific researchers.
Chapter 3 looks at the range of data collection tools available to users from search engines, web crawlers, APIs, and web scrapers to data aggregators that provide insights into a specific type of data. Useful resources, including Bing, Bing Search API 2.0, and Google (search engines), Heritrix and SocSciBot (web crawlers), Google Trends (data aggregators), and ScraperWiki (web scrapers), are highlighted. Throughout the book, the author identifies web metrics tools that are either free or inexpensive, a boon to readers without access to the more commercial, subscription-based tools.
Chapter 4 discusses how library and information professionals can evaluate the impact of their organizations on the web by analysing their organizations’ published content such as blogs, wikis, and web sites using such tools as Google Analytics, log analysis, URL citations, PageRank, and site linking. Chapter 5 continues the theme of evaluation in relation to social media tools and touches on sentiment analysis. The chapter includes a YouTube case study of the UK higher education institution library websites using Webometric Analyst – revealing that comments posted about their YouTube videos were generally positive.
Taking social media analytics further, Chapter 6 highlights how web metrics can inform about relationships between different parties. Here, the author describes the main methods of social network analysis including node centrality, cluster identification, and modularity. Two case studies are included, one drawn from local government, using URL citations to demonstrate the interlinking between local government institutions, the other from higher education libraries, providing insight into the relationships of these libraries on Twitter. Each case study helpfully includes screen shots of the visual relationships between the parties.
Chapter 7 expands on developments in the area of web bibliometrics. New bibliographic tools, such as Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Research, increase the amount of accessible scholarly literature, providing new insights into the impact of research. This, in turn, can lead to improved services offered by library and information professionals. The chapter includes a short discussion on full-text analysis and how techniques such as natural language processing and data extraction may be used to provide deeper insight when conducting citation analysis. Text mining tools mentioned include open source tools such as KNIME and GATE.
Chapter 8 introduces the reader to the concept of the web of data, as opposed to the web of documents. By this, the author means the semantic web, which links data together and provides semantic context, enabling richer and more meaningful search and retrieval. The chapter discusses semantic web metrics tools such as LDSpider and Sindice and concludes that a semantic web not only enables structured content to be investigated across many different web sites, but will also offer insight across all areas of web metrics. The author provides enough background on the building blocks of the semantic web for the reader to grasp the basics.
The final chapter outlines the future of web metrics and discusses the growing demand for disciplines such as data science and expansion of data sizes and varieties, with the author contending that the skills possessed by library and information professionals can be leveraged in this area. Indeed, the adoption of web metrics capabilities by library and information professionals provides an easy segue into the fast-paced world of analytics to create valuable insights for customers.
Overall, the book is comprehensive in its coverage, and the library and information environment examples it includes are helpful. For those new to web metrics, it is not a text that can be read quickly as concepts such as the RDF triple data format in the semantic web take time to absorb. For those in the library and information field with an intermediate level of knowledge of web metrics and analytics who wish to further their knowledge and develop new offerings for their organization, however, it proves a solid and reliable guide.
