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

[Leslie Burke]

Personally, I would rather have reports that focus on the whole book/journal level than article or chapter level (for journals, I don’t mind splitting to archival vs current). I typically use the monthly data to see if there are specific times of year things are being used when  it might be related to a course offered that term or offered intermittently.

Leslie D. Burke
Collection Services Librarian, Library
Kalamazoo College
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From: Eril-l <eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org> On Behalf Of Melissa Belvadi
Sent: Friday, July 05, 2019 12:24 PM
To: eril-l <eril-l at lists.eril-l.org>; CRKN Collections List <collections at list.crkn-rcdr.ca>
Subject: [Eril-l] COUNTER monthly data - how do you use, could it be separate by month?

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<mailto:mbelvadi at upei.ca>  902-566-0581
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