Uses of Necessity or Uses of Convenience? What Usage Statistics Reveal and Conceal About Electronic Serials

The standardization and assessment of processes related to managing electronic resources have necessarily lagged a few years behind the inception of such processes. As an example, electronic journals (e-journals) had been available for several years before Nancy Olson's Cataloging Internet Resources was published in 1995. 1 Until the publication of Olson's seminal text, pioneering catalogers developed uncoordinated local practices within the construct of AACR2 and MARC to provide bibliographic description for these elusive resources. Several years before the Digital Library Federation (DLF) commissioned Tim Jewell of the University of Washington to investigate management issues associated with electronic…