Data Stories: Four years of incoming OpenURLs

Last week I put together the 2010 Quarter 1 report on K-State's incoming OpenURLs for Adam Chandler's OpenURL Quality Metrics project. For more details about this project see the previous post, Adam's blog, or NISO's description of the new IOTA Working Group. The number of incoming OpenURLs during the first quarter looked pretty good to me but I wondered how it compared to the number of incoming OpenURLs we've received during the first quarter of previous years. I used some of our historical data to take a picture of how usage of SFX has and has not changed over four years.

For those of you keeping track, the number of incoming OpenURLs in any given period is just another way of talking about the number of requests received during that period. The number of requests we receive is recorded monthly in the historical data's Req&ClickTotals spreadsheets. I extracted only the first quarter of each year's data and ended up with this:

 

A spreadsheet is a poor substitute for a story. So here's a short story about first quarter usage of SFX at K-State.