Tracking Usage in the Age of AI

https://nisoplusglobalonline.cadmore.media/niso-2026-session/275f3e2f-788f-4921-a2d1-18cfadd5d008

<p>Measuring the impact of scholarly content is critical for publishers, who must demonstrate its value to libraries and other stakeholders. Traditionally, online usage tracking was focused primarily on human activity, but machine usage of content can no longer be deprioritized; when assessing the impact of a particular title or collection, content providers and libraries are eager to capture all available data, including uses by AI. However, not all AI uses are alike: some represent a human end-user, while others originate from bots indiscriminately scraping sites for data. Stakeholders must consider iImportant questions about the different types of machine usage, such as search, summarization, and synthesis with AI tools, and how that usage might be counted and assessed differently. In this pre-conference, speakers and participants will explore how developing best practices for counting and reporting AI usage could be adapted and extended for a variety of scholarly platforms and applications. Attendees will learn about existing work as well as newly developing approaches and plan additional efforts to define AI usage for publishers and other content repositories.</p> <p><strong>Speakers:&nbsp;</strong><strong>Todd Carpenter</strong>, NISO,&nbsp;<strong>Tasha Mellins-Cohen</strong>, COUNTER, and&nbsp;<strong>Michelle Urberg</strong>, LibLynx</p>