consortium made available in 2004–05 and again during 2010–11. Scholars Portal— created in 2001—serves as OCUL’s information infrastructure for delivering digital content and services to support research, teaching, and learning endeavors within the province’s 21 universities.3 The consortium’s user base is extensive, with over 400,000 FTE users, and Scholars Portal provides a wide array of content: e-resources alone now number over 17 million articles from over 8,000 e-journals as well as 240,000 e-books. The size of the consortium affords unique opportunities to demonstrate the value of electronic resources by collecting data on the use of e-resources licensed both by the consortium and by individual member libraries. In 2004–05, OCUL implemented the MINES for Libraries® survey to measure use of over 7,000 e-journals locally loaded on their Scholars Portal platform. Key outcomes pursued at that time were: • Capturing in-library and remote web usage of Scholars Portal in a sound representative sample • Identifying the demographic differences between in-house library users as compared to remote users by status of user • Identifying users’ purposes for accessing Scholars Portal electronic services (funded research, non-funded research, instruction/education use, student research papers and course work) • Developing an OCUL infrastructure to make studies of patron usage of OCUL networked electronic resources routine, robust, and integrated in decision making4 OCUL found MINES for Libraries® to be an effective means of providing data on the use of e-resources and member institutions were able to use the data locally to argue for resources and demonstrate the relationship of resources to outcomes. OCUL determined that the study should be repeated in 2010–11. In February 2010, OCUL launched MINES for Libraries® a second time. In addition to querying the who, what, where and why of e-resource usage to provide longitudinal comparability, key issues to be explored in 2010–11 include: • Methodological best practices as to whether such a survey should be mandatory or optional • Survey implementation issues introduced by using an open-URL resolver • Potential characteristics of the non-respondents of web-based, intercept surveys RLI 271 42 The Value of Electronic Resources: Measuring the Impact of Networked Electronic Services ( C O N T I N U E D ) AUGUST 2010 RESEARCH LIBRARY ISSUES: A BIMONTHLY REPORT FROM ARL, CNI, AND SPARC