What is COUNTER?

Project COUNTER is an industry initiative that provides guidelines for the measurement, creation, and distribution of online usage reports to institutional subscribers. See http://www.projectcounter.org for more information.

Alexander Street Press has made a commitment to provide COUNTER compliant usage reports to our subscribers.

What are the features associated with COUNTER Release 4?

The COUNTER Release 4 standards contain the following new features to improve the delivery of consistent, credible and comparable usage statistics:

• An expanded list of Definitions in the Glossary of Terms, including terms such as ‘gold open access’, ‘multimedia full content unit’, ‘record view’, ‘result click’, as well as different categories of ‘access denied’, etc. that are used for the first time in Release 4.
• A single, integrated Code of Practice covering journals, databases, books, reference works and multimedia content.
• Enhancements of the SUSHI (Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative) protocol designed to facilitate its implementation by vendors and its use by librarians.
• New multimedia reports, which cover the usage of non-textual multimedia resources, such as audio, video and images.
• Flexibility in the reporting period for all usage reports, which allows customers to specify a date range for their usage reports.
• A set of new optional reports that enable usage of content on mobile devices to be reported separately.

What is SUSHI and how does it relate to COUNTER Release 4?

• The SUSHI (Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative) protocol has been incorporated into the COUNTER Code of Practice.
• SUSHI has been developed by NISO (National Information Standards Organizations) in cooperation with COUNTER.
• SUSHI allows for the automated retrieval of the COUNTER usage reports into local systems, making the harvesting and aggregating of usage reports much less time consuming for the librarian or library consortium administrator.
• Several SUSHI client tools are currently available through various vendors.
• For more information or assistance with taking advantage of this new service, please contact Technical Support at https://support.proquest.com/#submitcase.

Database Reports

Database Report 1 (DB1): Total Searches, Result Clicks and Record Views by Month and Database

Platform Report 1 (PR1): Total Searches, Result Clicks and Record Views by Month and Platform

Multimedia Reports

Multimedia Report 1 (MR1): Number of Successful Full Multimedia Content Unit Requests by Month and Collection

Multimedia Report 2 (MR2): Number of Successful Full Multimedia Content Unit Requests by Month, Collection and Item Type

ASP Customized Reports

Usage by Subject Area: Number of content unit requests (playbacks) of titles by subject area

Usage by Collection: Number of content unit requests (playbacks) of titles by collection

Title Usage by Subject Area: Number of times each title is viewed or played, presented in descending order and grouped by subject area

Title Usage by Collection: Number of times each title is viewed or played, presented in descending order and grouped by collection

Report Formats

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) - The coded format language used for creating hypertext documents on the World Wide Web and controlling how Web pages appear.

CSV (Comma Separated Variable) - The simplest form of file for holding scientific, or other, data. Data is listed in columns in a text file, each value being separated by a comma. Each new line represents a new set of data.

XLS - Excel format spreadsheet

XML (Extensible Markup Language) - A text format designed for ease of implementation and for interoperability with both SGML and HTML. The XML format will make it easier for customers to manipulate and merge the reports from different vendors.

Result Clicks and Record Views in COUNTER Release 4 DB1 reports

The purpose of the DB1 report is to give a database-centric view to the activity on the site(s). It intentionally separates the platform from the databases in order to allow the users to judge the value of the database.

Alexander Street Press does have products where specific records are associated to more than one database. While these instances are not pervasive, they certainly do exist.

For COUNTER Release 4 purposes, a search to multiple databases is reflected to each database, even though the user executed a search. For the instances where a record is associated to more than one database, for the DB1 report we have followed a similar path, i.e. for records that belong to multiple databases, a Result Click and Record View for that record will be recorded on each of the databases the record belongs to. Note that this does not impact the PR1 report which contains the tally of all the Result Clicks and Record Views regardless of which database they belonged to.

We are aware that if tallying the totals for the Result Clicks and Record Views for all the databases in DB1 will possibly result in a higher number than the Result Clicks and Record Views in the PR1 report. However, we have done so for these reasons:

• The COUNTER reports right now don't provide any specific guidance whether the DB1 Result Clicks and Record Views should be de-duplicated and if so, how.
• Deduplication would likely mean we would be adding an algorithm which would assign the Result Click and Record View to a specific database even though that might not represent the real intent of the user.
• By using a deduping algorithm, we would introduce factors, which as rational they might be, they are still assumptions with which we'd be potentially distorting the user's decision-making process by introducing our conditions, as honest or well thought through as they might be.
• By allowing the data stored and reported unfiltered we are allowing the librarians get all the information necessary to judge the value of the particular database. We don't filter, we don't change the numbers but the librarian has a full view of the data stored.
• In similar fashion, our own departments can review the complete, unfiltered set of data to determine the value of particular databases without us having manipulated the data
• Our Intellectual Property owners likewise see the complete dataset as well, allowing them to judge the usage and value of the content without any intervention or modifications from our side.
• All the three interested parties listed above ensure we offer complete, unfiltered information, allowing them to judge the value of the content and take the appropriate actions without us having interfered with their rationale.

Keeping in mind that the PR1 report servers the platform-wide, aggregated number of Result Clicks and Record Views for our users, the Result Clicks and Record Views for DB1 serve a different, database-centric view helping the librarians, our own editorial department as well as our intellectual property owners review the totality of the data and judge the usage from the appropriate point of view.