Abstract
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.
KEYWORDS:
INTRODUCTION TO USUS
With increasing pressure on library budgets, there is a corresponding increased pressure on libraries to prove the value of e-resources provided to their users. One of the key ways to do this is through usage statistics. Usage statistics demonstrate that patrons searched databases, clicked on results found in search results, downloaded full-text items, viewed multimedia items, and more.
Collecting, processing, and analyzing e-resource usage statistics is a complex endeavor. Standards such as Counting Online Usage of NeTworked Electronic Resources (COUNTER) and the Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) have helped, but they are detailed and technical, and there are many issues that can prevent an error-free transfer of a vendor’s usage report into a library’s system. In addition, these standards must continue to evolve alongside e-resource formats and platforms.
It is in these areas of compliance, functionality, and interpretation that Usus, a community-run website established in 2014, is believed to play a critical role.Footnote1 Usus was constructed specifically to bring the groups involved with usage statistics—librarians, consortia, publishers, aggregators, and more—together and provide a place for documenting issues and conversations about e-resource usage statistics. To this end, the Usus website provides a forum for community discussion on issues relating to the COUNTER usage reports as well as wider usage issues, a place for COUNTER and SUSHI to solicit feedback on future plans and ideas, and a collection point for suggestions for new usage reports and metrics.
Sections of the Usus website include: Hints & Tips, which provides solutions to known problems and other helpful information; News & Opinions, a place for discussion of current and emerging trends in usage; Useful Links, which has links to relevant standards organizations, testing and conversion templates, and more; and Usage Report Issues, a list of issues submitted by users about vendors or reports with problems that are affecting the credibility or usefulness of the COUNTER reports. The role of the Supervisory Board is to troubleshoot and discuss these issues, determine if they are local or global issues, engage with vendors and publishers on solutions, and report out resolutions to the usage statistics community. The Supervisory Board also considers ways to improve the Usus website itself. A new feature introduced in this session was the RSS feed, located at http://www.usus.org.uk/feed/. This feature was created based on a request from the user community.
EXAMPLES OF ISSUES REPORTED
Many kinds of questions and issues have been reported since Usus began, including incorrect formatting on COUNTER reports, the interpretation of new metrics or validity of particular vendors’ approaches, the change from COUNTER Code of Practice 3 to 4, and the reloading of corrected statistics by vendors.
In this session, three example issues were discussed. The first was about ProQuest Database Report 1 reports, in which a user found that record views were much higher than result clicks, something that did not seem intuitively correct to them. In response, Usus outlined these two new metrics as follows: result clicks are generated when users are searching a database on the platform host and then clicking on a search result; record views are generated when users are opening a detailed record that the platform hosts, regardless of the source of the search. Because searches can be initiated on a discovery service or federated search system, there is the potential for a scenario in which users are accessing records from the database more often through the discovery service than searching directly within the database, resulting in ProQuest not seeing or counting the Result Click (since it happened on a different system) but still counting the record view (since they delivered the detailed record to the user).
The second issue was about the possibility that publishers are double-counting full text accesses as both Portable Document Format (PDF) and Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) downloads in their Journal Reports. For example, a user might be brought directly to an HTML version of an article via a link resolver, generating one use, and they might click on the PDF version moments later, generating a second use and adding two to the “full-text requests” for that title. The Usus response provided some history on this issue, sometimes called the “interface effect.” COUNTER’s past investigation into the situation resulted in the introduction of separate PDF and HTML counts in COUNTER JR1 and JR1 GOA reports to provide visibility into this potential effect. A discussion about this situation developed within the session during the Q&A portion, concluding that it might be a platform-level decision for which metric (HTML, PDF, or total) represents the most accurate usage.
The third issue was about ebrary BR2 Reports, in which ebrary defines “section requests” as the following uses: “the sum of pages viewed, copies made, pages printed, instances of PDF downloads, and instances of full-document downloads.” The person’s concern was the potential for this broad definition to artificially inflate the number of section requests when comparing ebrary to other e-book platforms that only count full-text chapter requests. Usus confirmed with COUNTER that a vendor or publisher’s definition of sections may vary so long as the sections are defined and that the user’s activity is only counted once. For example, if a user downloads a 10 page chapter, that action, which would be counted as one chapter download, cannot also be counted as 10 “page” download—the section type counted is based on the unit of access. Discussion about this within the session emphasized the difficulty that this kind of non-standard definition creates in interpreting usage statistics and also drew attention to the proposed new COUNTER Book Reports which address some of these issues and are currently available for review and comment on the Usus site.
TOOLS AND TEMPLATES
A number of testing and conversion templates are contained within the Useful Links section of the Usus website. One of these, the JR1 COUNTER Compliance Test template, performs 23 tests on a Journal Report 1, such as detecting format errors and invalid International Standard Serial Numbers (ISSNs) and flagging excessive usage. It shows the problems in the context of the report and provides a score-sheet about the results. There are also two conversion templates, one that converts a JR1 from Code of Practice 3 to Code of Practice 4 and one that converts a JR1 MISO Extensible Markup Language (XML) file to an Excel file. All of these templates were developed by Oliver Pesch of EBSCO Information Services.
DISCUSSION OF COUNTER RELEASE 4
The COUNTER standard is a living standard that can change significantly between releases. A number of important changes in the newest release, Code of Practice Release 4, were described during the session.
Database Reports
In Database Report 1, the requirement to report Session counts has been dropped, and a new requirement to report Record Views and Result Clicks has been added. These new metrics are generating a great deal of interest within the usage statistics community. The community is only beginning to develop a contextual understanding for the expectations around and interpretation of them.
Database Report 3 has been renamed Platform Report 1. Like Database Report 1, this report has Searches, Result Clicks, and Record Views, but with information captured at the platform level.
Journal and Book Reports
Vendors are now required to define the type of Section covered in Book Report 2. While this is an improvement, as mentioned above in the ebrary example, it can still be difficult to use these reports to compare usage across vendors.
Journal and Book Reports now require Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for journals and books. Proprietary identifiers for journals can also be included. These new identifiers can help librarians with matching usage to holdings or cost data. They are also helpful for libraries and consortia that want to isolate usage for collections or titles that are licensed from a particular funding source.
It is increasingly important for libraries to understand how users are accessing their resources, and a new optional report, Journal Report 1 Mobile, can help with this as it tracks the usage of journal content by mobile devices.
Usage of Gold Open Access articles must now be reported in Journal Report 1 GOA. It is important to note that this is not all Open Access—only Gold, or articles that have been Open Access from their time of publication.
Multimedia Reports
There is a new report that can be used to track usage of non-textual multimedia resources such as audio, video, or images. Reporting is at the collection level, not at the title level.
COUNTER DRAFTS FOR PUBLIC REPORT
The Usus website has been used to gather feedback about changes to COUNTER reports. Some of the currently proposed changes that are available for public review are as follows.
Changes to Book Reports
Proposed Book Report 7 would count unique book views. This would provide a better comparison to print book usage than has been available before and would make it easier to compare e-books on different platforms and from different vendors.
Proposed Book Report 8 would provide separate metrics for Book Views (complete book), Chapter Views, Entry Views (e.g., article in an encyclopedia), or Other. In essence it would make it possible to record different types of sections, as appropriate for different types of e-books, in a unified report.
Proposed Book Report 9 would provide a summary that allows customers to identify, for a particular book collection, book titles that are used and not used during a particular reporting period. This should help in the holistic evaluation of an e-book package or collection.
New Provider Discovery Reports
These proposed reports would provide publishers and other content providers with valuable feedback about the use of their metadata and content on discovery services. They would parallel the current customer-facing reports BR7, DB1, JR3, and MM1 and would include usage from all customers using the content provided by the publisher or content provider.
ON THE HORIZON
SUSHI, as it defines a way to automate the request and retrieval of usage statistics from vendors, is an important component of the usage statistics environment. The SUSHI Server Registry, currently hosted on the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) website, assists librarians in configuring SUSHI to harvest COUNTER statistics from a particular publisher or platform. Bringing this registry over to the Usus website is currently being explored with the goal of providing more robust data, easier searching of the platforms, providers, and publishers included in the registry, and a way for users to suggest changes.
An exciting development is the new SUSHI-Lite protocol. Unlike SUSHI, which facilitates requests for full COUNTER reports, the SUSHI-Lite protocol provides a simplified approach that allows for the delivery of much smaller bundles of usage, such as at the article level. It also allows embedding of usage in applications via widgets.
DISCUSSION
In addition to the discussion points mentioned above, attendees also had questions about the transition from Code of Practice 3 to Code of Practice 4, in particular concerns about having a reporting year split by the two releases. It was recommended that people re-run the full year under consideration using Code of Practice 4 so that their data would be consistent. An attendee also suggested that Usus request section definitions from e-book providers and create a reference table on the website. Usus will follow up on this recommendation.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Anne Osterman
Anne Osterman is VIVA Director, Virtual Library of Virginia, Arlington, Virginia.
Oliver Pesch
Oliver Pesch is Chief Product Strategist, EBSCO Information Services, Ipswich, Massachusetts.
Kari Schmidt
Kari Schmidt is Technical Services Manager, Montgomery College Libraries, Rockville, Maryland
Notes
1. Information about Usus can be found at: http://www.usus.org.uk.