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Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funds two-year LANL project for the development of metrics derived from scholarly usage data. Los Alamos, New Mexico, November 6th 2006 - The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded funding to Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in support of the two-year MESUR project that will investigate metrics derived from the network-based usage of scholarly information. The Digital Library Research & Prototyping Team of the LANL Research Library will carry out the project. Johan Bollen is the Principal Investigator, Herbert Van de Sompel serves as an architectural consultant, and Aric Hagberg of the LANL Mathematical Modeling and Analysis group serves as modeling consultant. Marko A. Rodriguez, PhD student at the University of California Santa Cruz and LANL Graduate Research Assistant, supports the project's research and development. The project's major objective is enriching the toolkit used for the assessment of the impact of scholarly communication items, and hence of scholars, with metrics that derive from usage data. The project will start with the creation of a semantic model of scholarly communication, and an associated large-scale semantic store that relates a range of scholarly bibliographic, citation and usage data obtained from a variety of sources. Next, an investigation into the definition and validation of usage-based metrics will be conducted on the basis of this comprehensive collection. Finally, the defined metrics will be cross-validated, resulting in the formulation of guidelines and recommendations for future applications of metrics derived from scholarly usage data. Projects results will be made public on the project's web site <http://www.mesur.org/>. The MESUR project currently has an open position for a software developer; a job description is available at <http://www.mesur.org/Jobs.html>. -- Herbert Van de Sompel Digital Library Research & Prototyping Los Alamos National Laboratory, Research Library http://public.lanl.gov/herbertv/ tel. +1 505 667 1267