RE: COUNTER Report Consolidation Service

["David Goodman" <David.Goodman@liu.edu>]

To the best of my memory as a founding member of the COUNTER Executive
Board, COUNTER has never been asked to certify any aggregation service. It
has for some time considered that while such services could be very
valuable, they could better be developed by other parties, commercial or
non commercial.

If libraries think it would appropriate for COUNTER to take a role in
verifying such services, I would encourage them to say so (off list) to
Peter Shepherd (pshepherd@projectCounter.org), because such decisions can
alsways be reconsidered.

Dr. David Goodman
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
dgoodman@liu.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu on behalf of David Sommer
Sent: Wed 2/16/2005 7:16 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: COUNTER Report Consolidation Service

There have been two recent postings to this list regarding how librarians
have found COUNTER reports to be of great value, however they have found
the mechanical process of manually downloading these reports every month
from multiple vendors/publishers/service providers (sometimes hundreds
each month) to be very time consuming.  Collectively across the library
world, many thousands of hours each month are being wasted essentially
copying and pasting spreadsheets together and then formatting them.

MPS Technologies together with IBM (our statistics technology partner)
have recently been looking at this issue.  We already provide COUNTER data
processing services to a number of publishers.  COUNTER has achieved a
great deal in defining standards for usage reporting and for standardizing
the processing of usage data.  MPS is now looking at how we can automate
some of the manual tasks required to make the resulting COUNTER reports
more useful and to make life easier for librarians.

I am interested to know whether there is demand for a service for
libraries/consortia that would enable you to receive a single set of
consolidated COUNTER reports each month.

At this stage we are working out the details of how the service would work
(data collection, merging, delivery etc) and would very much appreciate
input from librarians that might find this of value.  If you feel that
this might be of interest to you, and would like to be part of a beta
trial (with all data treated confidentially), please contact me directly
at D.Sommer@Macmillan.com.  We would mainly work by email, and I would
expect the total time commitment from you at this stage to be a couple of
hours at the most.

I should state that, although I am a member of the COUNTER Executive
Committee, this is not an official statement from COUNTER.

Thank you,

_______________________________________________

David Sommer
MPS Technologies
Email: D.Sommer@Macmillan.com
Web: www.mpstechnologies.com
Tel: +44 (0)20 7843 4858 (Direct Line)
Tel: +44 (0)20 7833 4000 (Switchboard)