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) ?

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 3 rd party

UKSG Conference 2007 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.BR1Book Report 1: Number of Successful Title Requests by Month and Title 2.BR2Book Report 2: Number of Successful Section Requests by Month and Title 3BR3Turnaways by Month and Title 4.BR4Turnaways by Month and Service 5.BR5Total Searches and Sessions by Month and Title 6.BR6Total Searches and Sessions by Month and Service

UKSG Conference 2007

COUNTER Compliance Vendor BR1 BR2 BR3 BR4 BR5 BR6 Reports Available in XML? Blackwell Publishing Ltd Yes Greenwood Publishing Group Yes No MyiLibrary Yes No Xrefer 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 ?

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

UKSG Conference 2007 Other Issues Current focus of analysis is on sessions and searches:  Impact of technological innovations – RSS/Alerts, Metasearch/OpenURL  Count of items as most effective measure? SUSHI for automated harvesting of usage stats

SUSHI Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative  automated 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