Understanding, implementing and using the COUNTER Code of Practice for Books and Reference Works

Jenny Walker

Xrefer Ltd.

UKSG Conference 2007

" Long and painful experience has taught me one great principle in managing business for other people, viz., If you want to inspire confidence, give plenty of statistics. It does not matter that they should be accurate, or even intelligible, as long as there is enough of them."

Lewis Carroll (C. L. Dodgson) Three Years in a Curatorship by One Whom It Has Tried (1886)

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UKSG Conference 2007

Lies, damn lies and usage statistics

“Lies, damn lies and usage statistics”. Web4Lib. March/April 2007 Ouija Boards?Using stats from:

EZProxy servers Metasearch Link Resolvers

COUNTER Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic

Resources Non-profit organization formed in 2002 Builds on related work of ARL, ICOLC and

NISO. COUNTER Code of Practice for Journals and

databases (v2 April 2005); Books and Reference Works (v1 March 2006)

Register of compliant vendors; compliance is audited by 3rd party

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COUNTER for Books and Reference Works Built on success –and structure - of COUNTER

for ejournals, but… Difficult to develop. What is a content unit? Demand from librarians not yet very strong

Decision to develop, release and then tweak Code of Practice released March 2006 Four vendors have implemented this:

Blackwells, Greenwood, Coutts and Xrefer

UKSG Conference 2007

COUNTER Reports

1. BR1 Book Report 1: Number of Successful Title Requests by Month and Title

2. BR2 Book Report 2: Number of Successful Section Requests by Month and Title

3 BR3 Turnaways by Month and Title

4. BR4 Turnaways by Month and Service

5. BR5 Total Searches and Sessions by Month and Title

6. BR6 Total Searches and Sessions by Month and Service

UKSG Conference 2007

UKSG Conference 2007

COUNTER Compliance

 Vendor BR1  BR2  BR3  BR4  BR5  BR6

 Reports Available in XML?

 Blackwell Publishing Ltd    Yes    Yes    Yes  Yes

 Greenwood Publishing Group  Yes  Yes      Yes    No

 MyiLibrary    Yes  Yes      Yes  No

 Xrefer    Yes        Yes  No

UKSG Conference 2007

Implementation: Xrefer case study

Code of Practice released March 2006 Existing Xreferplus proprietary reports including:

Searches, sessions and entries viewed Most popular titles, most popular searches

COUNTER implementation developed in a couple of days and released in June 2006

Title vs section requests? COUNTER turnaway reports not applicable; no limits on

usage per institution Double counting? Compliance July 2006

UKSG Conference 2007

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UKSG Conference 2007

Too few (core) books available online Need better understanding of ebook usage

metrics what should libraries measure? who is using ebooks? how are they using these? downloading whole books? chapters?

Not enough COUNTER-compliant vendors

UKSG Conference 2007

JISC Initiative 2007 (Core text books)

The national e-books observatory project will assess the impacts, observe behaviours and develop new models to stimulate the e-books market. See http://www.jiscebooksproject.org/

UKSG Conference 2007

Other Issues

Current focus of analysis is on sessions and searches: Impact of technological innovations –

RSS/Alerts, Metasearch/OpenURLCount of items as most effective measure?

SUSHI for automated harvesting of usage stats

SUSHI

Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiativeautomated harvesting of usage data from publisher (or

aggregator) sites Works with COUNTER XML reports and other

usage reports (including those for books and reference works)

Important for libraries and content providers Draft standard for trial use – Sept 2006

UKSG Conference 2007

What you should do

Publishers Just do it! Learn from journal and database experience

Librarians demand COUNTER compliance of your providers;

but.. Be aware of (sometimes significant) changes in usage statistics

when switching from vendor-specific statistics Know that even COUNTER is not perfect eg session timeouts vary

by vendor Understand the impact on usage statistics of “new” technologies eg

RSS/Alerts, metasearch, mashups

Questions/Discussion

jenny.walker@xrefer.com