The shift in scholarly communication has called for new ways to measure scholarly impact. Altmetrics has recently garnered significant attention within the academic community as a promising new area for the measurement and evaluation of research impact by using online tools to gather a variety of metrics related to scholarly output. But how well do these promises hold up, and how can libraries help to influence the conversation regarding altmetrics and its future? This issue of Library Technology Reports introduces the concept of altmetrics in relation to existing citation-based research metrics, positioning its use in the larger academic community. Discussing both the promise and the controversy of altmetrics, the authors offer practical guidance on such topics as:

major academic tools and peer networks, such as institutional repositories (IRs), CiteULike, and Mendeley;
Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, and other social media sources that comprise the spectrum of altmetrics;
altmetric harvesting tools, such as Altmetric, Impactstory, and Plum X;
educating and supporting the academic community in the use of altmetrics;
measuring article-level impact independent of scholarly journals.