Counting Online Usage Of Networked Electronic Resources Research Articles

COUNTER 5: Lessons Learned and New Insights Achieved

ABSTRACT COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of NeTworked Electronic Resources) Release 5 has brought many improvements to reporting usage of e-resources. This session covered the three main developments which are the ability to see both total and unique downloads, the default exclusion of Gold Open Access usage in Standard View reports, and the introduction of the Unique_Title metric for reporting e-book usage. Examples of the manner in which different types of e-journal and e-book usage are reported with the new metrics as well as recommendations for calculating cost per use were also provided. Detailed information on Release 5 can be found in COUNTER Foundation Class YouTube videos and the Release 5 Manual for Librarians.

Encountering COUNTER 5

To make fiscally and academically responsible selection and deselection of subscribed content, it is critically important to have reasonably accessible usage data for those resources. To this end, the organizers of Project Counting Online Usage of NeTworked Electronic Resources (COUNTER) initiated the development of a standard known as the COUNTER Code of Practice. Beginning with the year 2019, COUNTER 5 standardized usage reports are available for most commercially published electronic information resources such as online journals, aggregated research databases, and ebooks. This column explores some of the differences between the COUNTER 5 Title Master Report-Journal Report (TR-JR1) report and the COUNTER 4 JR1 report for online journal usage and offers some assistance in extracting specific data from the TR-JR1 report that is not as readily visible as it was in COUNTER 4 reports.

Compelling Evidence: New Tools and Methods for Aligning Collections with the Research Mission

ABSTRACT Librarians at the Galter Health Sciences Library & Learning Center evaluated citation data from clinical trials and patents as potential indicators of library collection strengths and research trends at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. These under-examined resources were of interest because of their relation to translational research, which is a central area of focus in the library’s mission. Digital Science Dimensions (Dimensions) was used as a data source to capture the clinical trial and patent data as part of a collaboration between Galter Library and Dimensions. Upon completing a brief pilot using clinical trials to identify collection gaps, various analyses were applied to data for all patents that had Northwestern University as an assignee from 2008 to 2017. The findings were compared with traditional metrics such as Counting Online Usage of NeTworked Electronic Resources (COUNTER) compliant usage statistics and journal impact factor to identify core resources and trends unique to patents. This study is potentially of interest to libraries supporting research-intensive organizations where patents may shed new light on collection use.

Identification of Important E-Journals from Article(S) Sought by the Users: An Analysis of Access Denied Usage Report

Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources (COUNTER), JR2 (Journal Report 2) - access denied to fulltext articles by month, journal, and category; for the year 2016 and 2017 studied. This paper tries to identify what other e-journal sources apart from current licensed one, that the users looked online to meet day-to-day information requirements. The JR2 usage data downloaded from 13 e-journals platform / content provider for the purpose and analyzed data. This analysis found most frequently paper(s) sought e-journals, year, platform, and publisher wise number of access denied papers during the year 2016 and 2017. It also explored number of e-journals from which at least a full text document tried to download. Bradford’s law of scattering applied to find core journals and found 23 e-journals based on JR2 access denied usage data. The study feels that like other methods and techniques employed by library and information professionals, the JR2 usage data analysis also an important tool to identify the best out of the best resources and help to bridge the gap in serials collection.

COUNTER: Looking Ahead to Release 5 of the COUNTER Code of Practice

ABSTRACTSince its first Code of Practice was published in 2003, setting the first international standard for reporting usage of scholarly content, Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources (COUNTER) has been continually refining the code of practice to meet the evolving needs of its library, publisher, and vendor membership. The latest release of the Code of Practice went into effect in early 2014 and introduced several improvements over the prior releases. Work is now underway on Release 5 of the COUNTER Code of Practice with a promise that it will provide further improvements to better report on usage of scholarly information in an ever-changing discovery and access environment. This column discusses current challenges and how Release 5 might address them.

Introduction to Usus, a Community Website on Library Usage, and a Discussion about COUNTER 4

Established in 2014, Usus (Latin for usage), supported by Counting Online Usage of NeTworked Electronic Resources (COUNTER), but editorially independent, is a community-run website designed to provide a space for librarians, consortia, publishers, aggregators, repository managers, and scholars to discuss all aspects of usage, including particular ways that use is measured. In this session, Usus Supervisory Board members provided an introduction to Usus, outlined the purpose of the community-run site, and discussed how librarians may utilize the site to submit ongoing and complex usage issues. In addition, the presenters engaged attendees in discussing specific e-resource usage issues they have encountered as well as report changes and additions in the recently released COUNTER Code of Practice 4.

Getting Started with COUNTER Statistics

A four hour post-conference workshop was offered on Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources (COUNTER) statistics with the goal of providing participants with hands-on experience working with and manipulating statistics. Best practices and methods were also discussed.

Predicting Use: COUNTER Usage Data Found to be Predictive of ILL Use and ILL Use to be Predictive of COUNTER Use

ABSTRACTMore and more libraries are investigating the possibility of breaking apart or unbundling their “Big Deal” publisher packages. In doing so, libraries acknowledge and ready themselves for the possibility of a significant portion of journal use shifting to interlibrary loan (ILL), and attempt to estimate what this shift from subscription to the ILL mode means in terms of costs. This study investigates three years of ILL usage data for 1651 journals prior to undertaking subscriptions and then Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources (COUNTER) usage for these same journals over a three year subscription period. The results suggest a predictive ratio of ILL requests to COUNTER uses and COUNTER uses to ILL requests.

Usus: A Community Website for those Interested in the Usage of Online Content

In 2014, Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources (COUNTER) sponsored the development of Usus, an independent website, to provide a valuable resource for the community of librarians, publishers, vendors, and others with an interest in usage of online resources. Usus (Latin for usage) is run by librarians and provides a forum to discuss issues related to usage, seek answers to questions about usage, and to provide suggestions and input on future COUNTER and Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative initiatives. This column offers a tour of Usus, providing a glimpse of what it offers, including a detailed examination of some of the tools it makes available.

Exploring academic e-book use: part I through text analysis

Purpose – Over the past decade, as the electronic book (e-book) collection continues to grow, Columbia University Libraries has been gathering information to develop policies related to e-book acquisition, discovery, and access. The purpose of this paper is to investigate users’ e-book search behavior and information needs across different disciplines. Design/methodology/approach – The research method utilizes text data from two sources: users’ e-book search queries that were entered into the libraries discovery tool called CLIO and e-book title words provided by the Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources (COUNTER) usage reports. The analysis involves identifying and quantifying certain words from users’ search queries with the purpose of examining the contexts within which these words were used. Findings – The prominence of topical words such as “history,” “social,” and “politics” in the list was an interesting reflection on the kinds of works users were looking for, as were the terms “handbook,” “guide,” and “manual.” The high frequency of these words imply that users were searching for broad topics, reference works, or other collections of instructions, all of which are intended to provide ready reference. Originality/value – Running search queries and e-book title words through a text analysis tool revealed new ideas related to what types of materials users search for and use. Text analysis of search terms and title words provided insight into the nature of e-book use, including broad topic (e.g. history), academic level of use (e.g. introductory), and genre/type (e.g. reference). While it is challenging to deduce reader intent from word frequency analysis, as text data remain widely open for interpretation, the methodology has significant strengths that drive us to continue to use in future studies.

Implementing SUSHI and COUNTER: A Primer for Librarians

Project Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources (COUNTER) released its first code of practice in 2002. Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) was introduced in 2007 as a way of automating the harvesting of COUNTER reports. Both initiatives have been well adopted yet there is still confusion about how to implement SUSHI. This column offers a primer for library staff wanting to take advantage of the benefits of SUSHI. It starts with a quick review of both COUNTER and SUSHI, then covers options for SUSHI clients, examines SUSHI configuration requirements, demonstrates how to use SUSHI to obtain a COUNTER report and shows an example of working with a COUNTER Journal Reports in Extensible Markup Language (XML) format to create a spreadsheet with a simple cost-per-use and package analysis. By the end the reader should gain enough knowledge to configure a SUSHI client, successfully harvest COUNTER statistics and to perform some basic analysis on that usage.

The KBART’s Potential beyond OpenURL Linking

Knowledge Base and Related Tools (KBART), initially founded with a focus on improving OpenURL linking through the definition of best practices for exchanging title-level metadata, continues to gain traction and has the potential to be an initiative that improves not only link resolver quality but also improves discovery services, electronic resource management (ERM) systems, and even Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources (COUNTER) usage reports. In this column we quickly review the history of KBART from its inception in 2007 through the creation of the Phase 1 and Phase 2 best practices. Then we investigate how KBART can positively influence the quality of discovery services, ERM systems, and COUNTER. Finally, we put forward some suggestions on how KBART can become the key to standardizing the exchange of holdings data within the information supply chain to address needs beyond link resolvers and eliminate some redundant holdings maintenance tasks in libraries.

COUNTER Codes and Practices of Vendors: What They Say and What They Do Not Say

The present study was undertaken to probe the effectiveness of Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources (COUNTER) reports with regard to usage of journals and to learn more about the practices adopted by different content providers in generating reports. Under Release 3 of the COUNTER Code of Practice, we closely examined reports from eighteen content providers having accounts with the University of Kashmir library. The University of Kashmir has subscription access to content from nineteen different providers through the UGC-Infonet Digital Library Consortium of India, eighteen of which are COUNTER-compliant. We were thus able to make observations on the practices of the American Chemical Society, the American Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, Annual Reviews, Cambridge University Press, Emerald, the Institute of Physics, JSTOR, Nature, Oxford University Press, Portland Press, Project Euclid, Project Muse, the Royal Society of Chemistry, Science Direct, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley. We discuss a number of patterns among the provider set that yield ambiguous or incomplete indications of journal usage. We offer to the library community and standard-making bodies a set of recommendations to seek better practices: (1) Providers should archive and make available a minimum of three years of historical usage data in addition to the current/most recent year; (2) Counts for titles that have undergone a title change should appear under the previous name for the applicable year rather than be subsumed in the count for the current form of title; (3) Usage reports for retrospective years should be limited to the title set that was available in the applicable year; (4) Usage reports should be limited to titles on subscription with the client institution; (5) The PR1 (Platform Report 1) should be required to enable librarians to acquire useful platform-specific information, such as popularity and usability of the platform; (6) Required output formats should include both the Tab Separated Values (TSV) and Extensible Markup Language (XML) formats (and we acknowledge that these formats are now required under COUNTER Release 4); and (7) Content providers should exercise great care in communications regarding platform changes to ensure that librarians can discern usage from each platform and combine usage numbers from each when not duplicated.

Book Review: Marketing Your Library’s Electronic Resources: A How-To-Do-It Manual for Librarians

Marketing Your Library's Electronic Resources: A How-To-Do-It Manual for Librarians. By Marie R. Kennedy and Cheryl LaGuardia. Chicago: Neal-Schmnan, an imprint of the American Library Association, 2013. 177p. $60 softcover (ISBN: 978-1-55570-889-4). How-To-Do-It Manuals. Marie Kennedy and Cheryl LaGuardia seek to fill a gap in the library literature by collaborating on a guide that is unique in its focus. Not only does it combine the critical topics of electronic resource management and library marketing, it addresses the need and the know-how for developing a marketing plan. The authors preface the book with their reasons for writing it, including limited patron awareness of electronic resources, a lack of librarian familiarity with marketing techniques, and a need to justify the value of library services and collections in the face of market competition and a tight economy. LaGuardia has written and reviewed widely on the subject of electronic resources, while Kennedy has lectured on and researched e-resources from a marketing perspective. Although both authors draw their experience from academic libraries, this book targets all library types and personnel, reflecting the belief that the most effective marketing occurs in the daily interactions of library staff with user communities. The manual is divided into two parts. Part 1 describes the step-by-step process of developing a marketing plan. The first chapter establishes the purpose of the plan, while subsequent chapters deal with design, implementation, writing, assessment, and revision. Part 2 provides sample marketing reports from a digital library, an academic library, and two public libraries. The Web Extra feature of the book offers access to PDF and editable Microsoft Word versions of these reports. Each chapter is well documented with cited references and recommended resources. In chapter 1, for example, coverage of Counting Online Usage of NeTworked Electronic Resources (COUNTER) includes the website for its Code of Practice. Chapter 2 points to such web tools as Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) templates for strategic planning and Gantt chart software for managing timelines. All URLs that I accessed were current as of this writing. True to their marketing theme, Kennedy and LaGuardia introduce key concepts with analogies to everyday life and popular culture. In chapter 1, they compare marketing without a plan to shopping without a list, with a reminder that the first part of making a list is taking stock of what you have. This strategy helps to illustrate and reinforce ideas in a user-friendly style. The how-to of e-resource marketing is outlined in chapter 2 with the design of a nine-step plan. Chapter 3, Implement Your Marketing Plan, shifts the focus to actual practice. …

Usage Factor for Journals: A New Measure for Scholarly Impact

Usage statistics are considered one of the most important inputs for collection development and more librarians are looking for a usage-based impact factor to help with collection decisions. This article describes the Usage Factor project, sponsored by United Kingdom Serials Group (UKSG) and Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources (COUNTER), and its work in developing a credible usage-based measure for journal impact.

Problems with e-books: suggestions for publishers

Problems with e-books: suggestions for publishers

Standards that Impact the Gathering and Analysis of Usage

This column examines several standards and best practices that impact the gathering and analysis of usage data. The role of Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources (COUNTER), Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI), and Knowledge Bases and Related Tools (KBART) are each considered from the perspective of the environment within which the librarian is operating. The column also considers how the quality and consistency of the data exchanged while using these standards contributes to a successful outcome.

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

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.

COUNTER and Usage Data: A Two-Part Webinar

COUNTER and Usage Data: A Two-Part Webinar was offered through the joint cooperation of NISO (National Information Standards Organization) and Project COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of NeTworked Electronic Resources). The first part was held May 6, 2009, and consisted of three presentations. Opening remarks were made by Todd Carpenter, managing director of NISO, who also moderated the session. The second part was held May 13, and also consisted of three presentations. Opening remarks for this session were made by Karen Wetzel, standards program manager of NISO, who also moderated the session.

Commercial Library Decision Support Systems: An Analysis Based on Collection Managers' Needs

In the current environment of widely dispersed and disparate electronic data sources, collection managers increasingly need tools such as decision support systems to routinely perform common types of collection analysis: collection comparison, usage, package deals, and resource sharing. Four commercial decision support systems, Serials Solutions’ 360 Counter, Thomson Reuters’ Journal Use Reports, Swets’ ScholarlyStats, and Serials Solutions’ Ulrich's Serials Analysis System, are considered for their strengths in the above types of analysis and across five additional dimensions: Project COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources) reports supported, analysis tools, custom data sources supported, reporting features, and product support. Current issues and future trends are discussed.