Swets Blackwell is 1st Subscription Agent to Achieve COUNTER Level 2 Compliance

[Ylann Schemm <yschemm@nl.swets.com>]

PRESS RELEASE

Lisse, The Netherlands
October 14th 2003

Swets Blackwell is First Subscription Agent to Achieve 
COUNTER Level 2 Compliance

Swets Blackwell has announced today that it is the first subscription
agent member to achieve level 2 compliance with COUNTER's international
e-journal usage standards. Swets has signed a formal declaration of
compliance with COUNTER, an international initiative launched in March
2002 designed to serve librarians, publishers and intermediaries by
facilitating the recording and exchange of online usage statistics.

COUNTER's (Counting Online Usage of NeTworked Electronic Resources)
specifications included data elements already collected by SwetsWise,
Swets Blackwell's web-based modular service for the procurement, access
and management of subscriptions and online information. Covering over 7660
full text publications from 272 publishers, SwetsWise' participation also
dramatically increases the number of titles and publishers for which
COUNTER-compliant usage reports are now available
(www.projectCounter.org).

Steven Hartman, Swets Blackwell's Commercial Director noted, "We are proud
to be the first subscription agent to make COUNTER compliant usage
statistics available for its customers. The COUNTER initiative complements
our goal of providing the library community with the functionality they
need. We look forward to contributing to the development of the COUNTER
Code of Practice over the coming years by routing customer responses back
to the project."

Peter Shepherd, COUNTER Project Director, said "We are thrilled that the
number of organizations complying with the Code of Practice continues to
grow, and that the first subscription agent has achieved compliance -
effectively making COUNTER-compliant usage data available for many more
titles."

About Swets Blackwell

Swets Blackwell is a leading, global subscription agent, with offices in
23 countries across six continents. It provides a wide variety of
subscription management solutions for academic, scientific, technical,
medical, corporate and government libraries and information centers
worldwide. Founded in 1901, Swets Blackwell counts among its 60,000
customers many of the world's major research libraries and over 30% of the
Fortune 500 companies. Please note that Swets Blackwell will change its
name to Swets Information Services as of December 2nd 2003. For more
information, visit www.swetsblackwell.com

About SwetsWise

SwetsWise offers one platform with two modules: SwetsWise online content
and SwetsWise subscriptions. The online content module offers users a
single point of access to content from the world's leading publishers,
boasting over 13 million searchable references and links to full-text
articles available from such prestigious publishers as as Elsevier, Wiley,
Blackwell Publishing, Kluwer, Springer, Emerald, Taylor & Francis, and
OECD. The subscription module gives full control over all steps of the
subscription management process. More information about SwetsWise online
content and, SwetsWise subscriptions can be found at www.swetswise.com
<http://www.swetswise.com>.

Swets Blackwell Media Contact:
Ylann Schemm, Communications Executive
Tel.: +31 (0)252 435 584
Email: press@nl.swetsblackwell.com <mailto:press@nl.swetsblackwell.com>