[Eril-l] COUNTER monthly data - how do you use, could it be separate by month?

[Melissa Belvadi]

Hi, all.
This is for people who work with COUNTER reports.
One of the new R5 COUNTER reports is the IR master report, which gives
usage at the article/chapter level rather than whole journal/book level.
One vendor is already starting to struggle with these reports getting too
big, and the year is only half over.
I've gotten in a discussion with them and the Project COUNTER people about
what to do about this and one idea is to provide very large reports only by
month, instead of "year to date" with separate columns per month.
My first take on this is that it would be incredibly inconvenient to get
the usage data only one month per spreadsheet file. My alternative idea
would be to split into alpha ranges by title although I'm not thrilled with
that either.

But I thought I'd ask you all what you even do with the monthly level data
in the first place.
I've only had two use cases for it, neither of which would be supported by
having every month in a separate file:
1. looking for anomalous spikes caused by hackers, so I could eliminate
them from my "true cost per use" calculations
2. re-calculating totals over different date ranges (eg fiscal year rather
than calendar year, or multiple years combined)

What else do you look at the monthly level COUNTER data for?

If a single report gets just too big for Excel, how would you want the
vendor to split it up for you?
Are you willing to have to use something like MS Access to work with some
reports, so getting a zipped csv/tsv/json would be a good choice for you?

Melissa Belvadi
Collections Librarian
University of Prince Edward Island
mbelvadi at upei.ca  902-566-0581
my public calendar
<http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=mbelvadi%40upei.ca&ctz=America/Halifax&mode=week>
Make an appointment <https://mbelvadi.youcanbook.me/> via YouCanBookMe
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