I am a huge fan of Athens, that is no secret. I firmly believe they provide a wonderful opportunity for hospital libraries to get on the equal access playground with other libraries. Academic medical libraries can afford or are allowed proxy servers and public libraries usually allow their patrons to login to resources from their web page. Until recently hospitals could not provide patrons with decent off campus access to their resources. Hospitals IT departments would not allow proxy access to the intranet. Athens frees hospital libraries from all that. Athens manages all of the access from their site, all you have to do is input the patrons into the database and activate the library resources. Patrons then have single sign on access (using their own unique username and password) to the library materials.

I know that Athens increased the usage of our library's online resources. By simply providing another method of access (off campus access) our journals and databases our statistics increased significantly. Increased usages statistics meant our resources were getting used more. We were getting more bang for our buck. In other words we were getting a better return on our investment on our electronic journals and databases? While I only had a few months worth of statistics at budget time to show our usage with Athens service, I was able to compare it with the previous year's same months usage statistics to my administration. Guess what my budget actually increased!

So why am I kicking myself? I am kicking myself because I don't have all of the data to prove it. As you might know, I left my job at that library for another. At the time I left we were only about 6 months into Athens. Not enough data to show any official results. I am also no longer at the library so my access to all of the statistics, electronic journal costs, etc. are unavailable to me. So what do I have? A whole lot anecdotal evidence, but no hard data. :(

If there are any librarians out there using Athens, take a look at your usage statistics and see whether or not your usage increased (I am betting it did) and how it effected your ROI on your journals. It is the perfect paper or poster topic to present or publish.