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| Natura: | Recurso educativo Open Access |
| Lingua: | en |
| Pubblicazione: |
2012
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| Accesso online: | https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ999850 |
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| _version_ | 1867181301765767168 |
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| author | Welker, Josh |
| author_facet | Welker, Josh Welker, Josh |
| collection | Education Resources Information Center |
| contents | Counting on COUNTER: The Current State of E-Resource Usage Data in Libraries Welker, Josh Library Services Databases Academic Libraries Electronic Libraries Use Studies Data Collection Data Processing Statistical Data Usability Library Automation Library Development Library Research Performance Technology Human Factors Engineering Research Problems Any librarian who has managed electronic resources has experienced the--for want of words--"joy" of gathering and analyzing usage statistics. Such statistics are important for evaluating the effectiveness of resources and for making important budgeting decisions. Unfortunately, the data are usually tedious to collect, inconsistently organized, of dubious accuracy, and anything but a joy to work with. Once the internet became the ubiquitous way to access content, it did not take long for the library community to create standards to ease the process of collecting usage data. In 2002, librarians formed Project COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources). A year later, COUNTER issued Release 1 of its Code of Practice, which outlined standards for publishers and vendors to report usage statistics. In 2007, the information science standards body NISO (National Information Standards Organization) created the Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative protocol, known casually as SUSHI, which provides an automated way to download COUNTER reports via the web. While COUNTER and SUSHI have helped libraries come a long way toward improving the adoption and availability of usage statistics for library market vendors, the author soon came to learn that there is still a good amount of work libraries must do to get the data they need to make critical collection development and database budgeting decisions. The author learned his lesson the hard way, by first turning to SUSHI with the hope it would fulfill his library's need for data about database usage. But at the end of the day and after all his work building a SUSHI client, he still ended up having to visit dozens of vendor websites to manually collect, collate, format, and analyze all the data himself, using the classic desktop applications Access and Excel. After becoming thoroughly disillusioned with SUSHI, the author wanted to know if he was alone or if other libraries were bogged down in the same statistical quagmire. The rest of this article is about the results of a survey he conducted among his peers to not only satisfy his own curiosity but with the hope that such a study would reveal insights that the vendor community and COUNTER/NISO could use to improve the standards and protocols for collecting and reporting usage statistics. (Contains 3 online resources.) |
| format | Recurso educativo Open Access |
| id | eric_EJ999850 |
| institution | ERIC Institute of Education Sciences |
| language | en |
| publishDate | 2012 |
| record_format | eric |
| spellingShingle | Counting on COUNTER: The Current State of E-Resource Usage Data in Libraries Welker, Josh Library Services Databases Academic Libraries Electronic Libraries Use Studies Data Collection Data Processing Statistical Data Usability Library Automation Library Development Library Research Performance Technology Human Factors Engineering Research Problems Counting on COUNTER: The Current State of E-Resource Usage Data in Libraries Welker, Josh Library Services Databases Academic Libraries Electronic Libraries Use Studies Data Collection Data Processing Statistical Data Usability Library Automation Library Development Library Research Performance Technology Human Factors Engineering Research Problems Any librarian who has managed electronic resources has experienced the--for want of words--"joy" of gathering and analyzing usage statistics. Such statistics are important for evaluating the effectiveness of resources and for making important budgeting decisions. Unfortunately, the data are usually tedious to collect, inconsistently organized, of dubious accuracy, and anything but a joy to work with. Once the internet became the ubiquitous way to access content, it did not take long for the library community to create standards to ease the process of collecting usage data. In 2002, librarians formed Project COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources). A year later, COUNTER issued Release 1 of its Code of Practice, which outlined standards for publishers and vendors to report usage statistics. In 2007, the information science standards body NISO (National Information Standards Organization) created the Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative protocol, known casually as SUSHI, which provides an automated way to download COUNTER reports via the web. While COUNTER and SUSHI have helped libraries come a long way toward improving the adoption and availability of usage statistics for library market vendors, the author soon came to learn that there is still a good amount of work libraries must do to get the data they need to make critical collection development and database budgeting decisions. The author learned his lesson the hard way, by first turning to SUSHI with the hope it would fulfill his library's need for data about database usage. But at the end of the day and after all his work building a SUSHI client, he still ended up having to visit dozens of vendor websites to manually collect, collate, format, and analyze all the data himself, using the classic desktop applications Access and Excel. After becoming thoroughly disillusioned with SUSHI, the author wanted to know if he was alone or if other libraries were bogged down in the same statistical quagmire. The rest of this article is about the results of a survey he conducted among his peers to not only satisfy his own curiosity but with the hope that such a study would reveal insights that the vendor community and COUNTER/NISO could use to improve the standards and protocols for collecting and reporting usage statistics. (Contains 3 online resources.) |
| title | Counting on COUNTER: The Current State of E-Resource Usage Data in Libraries |
| topic | Library Services Databases Academic Libraries Electronic Libraries Use Studies Data Collection Data Processing Statistical Data Usability Library Automation Library Development Library Research Performance Technology Human Factors Engineering Research Problems |
| url | https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ999850 |