Library policy is a central and determining element in the performance of universities and educational institutions. Libraries manage an increasing number of different resources, both digital and paper, with a considerable acquisition budget. The volume of data does not make it easy to manage the documentation policy, which is why it’s essential to be able to evaluate the usage of these resources, to assess their utility and estimate whether it is relevant to keep them year after year.
Moreover, in a context of reorganization of governance and funding for higher education and research, institutions and their document services must be able to have performance indicators that allow them to justify a return on investment and ensure the sustainability of their operations. Given the extremely broad scope of documentation resources and the allocated budget, the management of electronic resources is inevitably complex. Obviously, it’s also about offering a selection of documentation that is as close as possible to the needs and expectations of the academic communities. This has led to a need to be able to refer to reliable and homogeneous usage data and statistics for all resources.
Purpose of the COUNTER standard
With this in mind, publishers and librarians came together to standardize data and produce statistical reports. COUNTER was born and has become the new international standard for measuring the use of electronic resources. Created in 2002, COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of NeTworked Electronic Resources) provides a code of best practice for publishing "credible, consistent, and comparable" electronic resource usage statistics (Mellins-Cohen 2018b). Recently upgraded to version 5, it has been completely redesigned to accommodate the latest developments in the world of electronic resources.
To qualify for the label, suppliers must agree to binding procedures for compliance and verification of the quality of their usage statistics. These procedures have in common that they are based on independent expertise, which guarantees their reliability and legitimacy, and that they meet the needs of the client. They also have the advantage of encouraging e-resource providers to continually improve the quality of the usage reports they issue. Since 2009, regular independent audits of the accuracy, format and delivery of usage reports have been conducted to ensure that resources continue to meet the requirements of the Code of Practice.
This highlights another quality of COUNTER's approach, which is the revision of the Code of Practice frequently and at regular intervals. While the strength of the COUNTER Code of Practice lies largely in its ability to provide a normative and binding framework for the production and dissemination of statistics by e-resource providers, its purpose is first and foremost to attempt to define measurement standards that allow for the most accurate and appropriate assessment of the use of these resources.
How does it benefit libraries?
Collection usage statistics can be retrieved automatically. Librarians definitely save time and can use it to analyze needs and usage more precisely.
More importantly, COUNTER reports allow libraries to easily compare usage among content from different e-resource publishers and use this information to calculate the cost per download for their multiple subscriptions.
Academic libraries use COUNTER reports to:
- Decide whether to purchase or renew subscriptions, based on usage data or the number of denied accesses.
- Communicate to faculty the importance of the library and its resources.
- Understand user behavior and improve user experience.
There are three types of COUNTER metrics: usage, denied access, and searches.
To measure usage, COUNTER version 5 relies on two families of metrics: investigations and requests. An investigation is any user interaction with a content item or title, while a request corresponds specifically to the viewing or downloading of an entire content item.
Each access to an e-Anatomy or vet-Anatomy module is thus considered in COUNTER reports as a request. This is the key statistic for measuring the usage of IMAIOS content that academic libraries can subscribe to.
This measure allows you to identify ratios, in particular the cost per request or download, which is calculated as follows:
Annual subscription cost / unique_item_requests (number of content items viewed once)
In concrete terms, this cost per request or download ratio can be useful to compare different online publications you subscribe to.
To quantify denied accesses, there are two indicators: no_license and limit_exceeded.
An access denied is triggered as soon as a user has not been able to access the database because his institution is not subscribed or because the concurrent licenses have been exceeded. IMAIOS does not limit the number of concurrent connections and therefore does not trigger limit_exceeded.
And finally, research evaluation goes through four categories:
- Searches_Regular: Number of times a user performs a search in a database that they explicitly selected from a list of choices (e.g. e-Anatomy OR vet-Anatomy) or that was the only one available for the search.
- Searches_Automated : Number of times a user performs a search in a database that he has not explicitly selected in a list of choices (for example, a search on all IMAIOS databases : e-Anatomy, vet-Anatomy, e-Cases...).
- Searches_Platform: Number of times a user performs a search on the platform, regardless of the number of databases involved in the search.
- Searches_Federated: Number of times a search is launched in a federated way, through an API.
In this guide for librarians, you will find detailed case studies illustrating the different situations.
Version 5 of the COUNTER Code of Practice includes 4 master reports that include a wide range of activities:
- a Platform Master Report
- a Database Master Report
- a Title Master Report
- an Item Master Report
Each report has one or more predefined standard views: summaries of a particular type of activity, such as denied access. COUNTER master reports can be filtered and modified dynamically.
The SUSHI protocol: a considerable time saving
The Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) protocol is an automated request and response model for collecting usage data. Specifically, it is a tool that allows libraries to automate the retrieval of usage data and ensures its integration into statistical data processing tools, such as spreadsheets, databases, or CRM.
This protocol has greatly facilitated the processing of large volumes of usage data, making the process of compiling the data much less time consuming for the librarian or library consortium administrator.
If your institution subscribes to e-Anatomy or vet-Anatomy, you can access your COUNTER 5 compliant IMAIOS reports. You will also have the ability to configure SUSHI. To do this, simply register on the SUSHI page. This will allow you to start automatically collecting usage reports and downloading them using your favorite SUSHI ERM tool.
