JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, 57(13):1840–1851, 2006 The article presents the early findings of an exploratory deep log analysis of journal usage on OhioLINK, con- ducted as part of the MaxData project, funded by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services. OhioLINK, the original “Big Deal,” provides a single digital platform of nearly 6,000 full-text journals for more than 600,000 people; for the purposes of the analysis, the raw logs were obtained from OhioLINK for the period June 2004 to December 2004. During this period approximately 1,215,000 items were viewed on campus in October 2004 and 1,894,000 items viewed off campus between June and December 2004. This article provides an analysis of the age of material that users consulted. From a method- ological point of view OhioLINK offered an attractive platform to conduct age of publication usage studies because it is one of the oldest e-journal libraries and thus offered a relatively long archive and stable platform to conduct the studies. The project sought to determine whether the subject, the search approach adopted, and the type of journal item viewed (contents page, abstract, full-text article, etc.) was a factor in regard to the age of articles used. Introduction This article is one of a series to emerge from a major 3-year-long (2005–2007) international study, MaxData, conducted by University College London (UCL) and the University of Tennessee. The project was funded by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and its broad purpose was to compare the costs and benefits of various methods of usage data collection and analysis in selected libraries in the United States. We present the results of one of the research strands that set out to show what usage data could be obtained from deep log analysis, a methodol- ogy developed by the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (CIBER) team at UCL. This particular study is based on an analysis of the logs of OhioLINK, the Ohio Library and Information Network. Among its services OhioLINK provides a single digital plat- form of nearly 6,000 full-text journals for more than 600,000 people. From a methodological point of view OhioLINK offered a very attractive platform to conduct age of publication usage studies, given (1) that it is one of the oldest e-journal libraries (started in 1998) and thus offered a relatively long archive in which to conduct the studies, which normally are limited to 10 years or less, and (2) that it, uniquely, hosts nearly 6,000 journals from all publishers on a common platform, thus allowing a whole range of robust subject comparisons. Aims and Objectives In general terms, the aim of the research was to extract high-quality, robust, and insightful usage data from the logs of a long established and very large digital information col- lection, employing deep log analysis techniques. OhioLINK was very much that kind of collection and was therefore an ideal case study for such an analysis. This analysis was undertaken in order to understand the information seeking behavior of the virtual scholar better. More specifically, we sought to determine the age of ma- terial (journal articles) that was being used by scholars. We wished to concentrate on the age because databases of the size and accessibility of the likes of OhioLINK make it much easier to find older material than was the case with bibliographical systems and hard-copy collections and we Article Decay in the Digital Environment: An Analysis of Usage of OhioLINK by Date of Publication, Employing Deep Log Methods Paul Huntington, David Nicholas, and Hamid R. Jamali School of Library, Archive and Information Studies (SLAIS), University College London, Henry Morley Building, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom. E-mail: {p.huntington, david.nicholas}@ucl.ac.uk, h.jamali@gmail.com Carol Tenopir School of Information Sciences, University of Tennessee, 1345 Circle Park Drive, Room 451, Knoxville, TN 37996-0341. E-mail: ctenopir@utk.edu Received August 2, 2005; revised November 22, 2005; accepted November 22, 2005 © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. • Published online 12 September 2006 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/asi.20383