ABSTRACT
Researchers in Library and Information Science have, for many years, been extremely successful in adopting diverse research methods from other fields. In recent years, ethnographic studies, webometric analyses and datadriven studies of user behaviour have been used to develop significant insights into users of online library resources. Yet there are sizeable skill barriers that may stop users from adopting complex quantitative approaches. The academic literature discusses methodology in enough detail for expert readers to make a judgement on the validity of an approach and to understand the extent of the insights which it is likely to support. Other researchers without the same level of expertise, though, can be confused about how to implement these methods. This difficulty inspired creation of the Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources (TIDSR) in 2011. Freely available online, TIDSR provides a suite of evaluative methodologies for measuring and understanding the impact of digital collections. Its guides are extremely useful but, in common with any such resource, its aim to trigger a contributory culture to build content around the resource has not been fully achieved. I have attempted here to draw several introductory methodological approaches together to provide an idea of how each could best be used to increase the significance of findings and to allow us to produce research which is more easily generalisable. Given the myriad ways in which data about online users can be collected, my intention is not to provide a textbook for undertaking these methods. Indeed, such texts already exist for qualitative research in LIS (Gorman and Clayton, 2005; Pickard, 2007), and I would recommend that readers start with the two cited here. Instead, I have tried to provide an insight into the major approaches available to librarians and researchers and to suggest where they may, or may not, provide significant insights into the use of digital resources online. As such, I have adopted a warts-and-all approach: an honest account of where these methods are most useful and, indeed, where they may not provide meaningful insights. These methods are applicable to case study approaches, where an in-depth investigation of a particular website or digital resource is undertaken to gain specific knowledge of the resource and of the wider phenomenon which it represents.
