Evaluating Usage of Non-text Resources: What the COUNTER Statistics Don't Tell You

Abstract

In this era of tightening budgets, librarians are increasingly turning to usage data from licensed resource providers to support difficult collection development decisions. The most recent release of the Counting Online Usage of NeTworked Electronic Resources (COUNTER) code of practice for usage data reporting and the Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) Extensible Markup Language (XML) protocol further support this decision-making process. COUNTER reports are designed to primarily measure usage of textual resources. However, for multimedia resources, the usage patterns and terminology are different than textual materials and the COUNTER reports do not yet adequately address these differences. This article explores the unique challenges of reporting and effectively evaluating the usage of multimedia resources and identifies gaps in the existing COUNTER code of practice.