A COUNTER concern.

["Hamaker, Chuck" <cahamake@email.uncc.edu>]

As electronic access becomes the dominant model for accessing information
in many libraries we MUST be able to show administrators, faculty,
legislatures, funding agencies, PROOF of the utility of the products we
purchase or lease. IT is not intuitive that e-resources must be purchased.  
If we can't demonstrate utility, then administrators who think libraries
are deep pits of money being siphoned off from the institution, may feel
justified in reducing library support. The common cause of COUNTER is
critical for publishers and vendors and libraries. It brings order out of
what is almost chaos right now, and it helps define to external concerns
what it is we are about. If it works ultimately we might be able to point
to a single statistic showing overall activity in e-resources.

Some COUNTER vendors/publishers also include, when you request a COUNTER
report, additional reports that are not exactly COUNTER. I appreciate and
use that alternative data. But it complicates creating standard reports
(across multiple sources) when publishers and vendors do not provide the
COUNTER report(s) as separate reports (rather than bundled with others)
which in my experience is confusing for all concerned. However as this is
a new developing international standard, I think this is a fairly natural
stage of development.

The promise of COUNTER is so great, that I'm not quite as concerned that
ALL a vendor's /publishers products are not ALL compliant at this stage.

I think the question is whether there is a commitment over time to make
all products compliant. This is a new enough and welcome enough initiative
to expect the bumps and hope for the good of all concerned, the road gets
smoothed over time.

In training staff to download the literally hundreds of statistical
reports available right now to my library, (over 150 databases, multiple
reports per database when stats are available)  it helps to know which
products a vendor has made COUNTER compliant and exactly how to get JUST
the COUNTER stats by themselves. Otherwise we are back to manually
formatting and adjusting and defining fields, writing instructions and
procedures for each vendor separately. Or simply ignoring them!

Those vendor specific reports can be helpful, but I should be able to ask
for them separately rather than have them included when I want the COUNTER
reports. It helps lessen the difficulties enormously.

Chuck Hamaker
Associate University Librarian Collections and Technical Services
Atkins Library
University of North Carolina Charlotte
Charlotte, NC 28223
phone 704 687-2825