  The main goal of this research is to analyze the web structure and
performance of units and services belonging to U.S. academic libraries in order
to check their suitability for webometric studies. Our objectives include
studying their possible correlation with economic data and assessing their use
for complementary evaluation purposes. We conducted a survey of library
homepages, institutional repositories, digital collections, and online catalogs
(a total of 374 URLs) belonging to the 100 U.S. universities with the highest
total expenditures in academic libraries according to data provided by the
National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Several data points were taken
and analyzed, including web variables (page count, external links, and visits)
and economic variables (total expenditures, expenditures on printed and
electronic books, and physical visits). The results indicate that the variety
of URL syntaxes is wide, diverse and complex, which produces a
misrepresentation of academic library web resources and reduces the accuracy of
web analysis. On the other hand, institutional and web data indicators are not
highly correlated. Better results are obtained by correlating total library
expenditures with URL mentions measured by Google (r= 0.546) and visits
measured by Compete (r= 0.573), respectively. Because correlation values
obtained are not highly significant, we estimate such correlations will
increase if users can avoid linkage problems (due to the complexity of URLs)
and gain direct access to log files (for more accurate data about visits).
