Library and information professionals increasingly need to create, manage, and monitor a wide range of online content, from a library?s social media account and web sites to the new and traditional research outputs that funders expect to be made available openly online. It is important that they understand the new opportunities that web metrics provide for measuring the impact of an individual or an organisation?s content. This book provides an up-to-date introduction to a wide range of web metrics, with practical examples of how they can be best put to use.

The book will begin with a wider discussion on the role of metrics, and how web metrics overlap with associated concepts with a longer library and information science history such as scientometrics and bibliometrics. It will explore the latest tools that are available, many of which have changed since the publication of the first edition, as well as how we can expect the field to change in the future with machine intelligence and artificial intelligence becoming more widely available.

This new edition has been extended and updated throughout to reflect the rapidly changing nature of the field. As well as updates to the user-friendly tools and resources, there is a greater emphasis on the programming libraries that are available, as library and information professionals are increasingly willing to start engaging with data that is available programmatically.

After reading the book the information professional will not only be better placed to adopt web metrics in their workplace, but also be critical of the misuse of web metrics.

Table of Contents:

1 Introduction

Metrics

Indicators

Web metrics and Ranganathan?s laws of library science

Web metrics for the library and information professional

Responsible metrics

The aim of this book

The structure of the rest of this book

2 Bibliometrics, Altmetrics, Web metrics, and Webometrics

Introduction

Web metrics

Information science metrics

Web analytics

Relational and evaluative metrics

Validating the results

Conclusion

3 Data Collection Tools

Introduction

The anatomy of a URL, web links and the structure of the web

Search engines 1.0

Web crawlers

Search engines

Post Search Engine 2.0: fragmentation

Conclusion

4 Evaluating Web Impact

Introduction

Websites

Blogs

Wikis

Internal v. External Metrics

Internal metrics

External metrics

A systematic approach to content analysis

Conclusion

5 Evaluating Social Media Impact

Introduction

Aspects of social network sites

Typology of social network sites

The most popular social media services

Sentiment analysis

Conclusion

**6 Relational Web Metrics and Social Network **

Analysis

Introduction

Social network analysis methods

Node centrality

Cluster identification

Statistical properties of the graph

Topic modelling

Sources for relational network analysis

Two R Examples

Conclusion

7 Web Bibliometrics

Introduction

More bibliographic items

New bibliographic sources

Full text analysis

Greater Context

Conclusion

8 Web Metrics for Data and Code

Introduction

The web of data

From data documents??to a semantic web?

The Importance of Code

GitHub Statistics

A Brief Exploration of Code-metrics with R Conclusion

9 The Future of Web Metrics and the Library and Information Professional

Introduction

How far we have come

The future of web metrics

The future of the library and information professional and web metrics