[Eril-l] now: print vs. e stats (was: Cost per use from COUNTER 5 Ebook reports)

[Steve Oberg]

Melissa’s comment about anti-e-book stats reminds me of a puzzling phenomenon I’ve experience a lot in my current environment, in fact, since the day I first started. I am no longer directly involved in ERM but it’s a part of the group I oversee. Since I came here, I’ve made the case, over and over again, that the use of e-resources dwarfs all other use metrics, including for print. And this has continued to be the case for years. In addition, I’ve pointed out how much money we spend on e-resources vs. print or physical materials. The conclusion is that we better pay much better attention to managing our e-resources.

Yet there has been a curious resistance to that narrative that manifests in multiple ways: not enough (in my opinion) staffing devoted to ERM, a doubling down of an attitude that is something like “how great we are because we still buy so much in print,” an attempt to discredit e-resources usage data by claiming it is manipulated and overblown and therefore not trustworthy*, and an absence of mention of e-resource usage in a library-wide assessment plan.

It’s like there are librarians who are simply in denial about the important **to our users** of e-resources. So weird.

Steve

Steve Oberg
Assistant Professor and Group Leader for Acquisitions and Discovery Services
Buswell Library | Wheaton College (IL) | +1 (630) 752-5852

* Mistrust was justified by this C&RL article: https://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/article/view/17824/19653

From: Eril-l <eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org> on behalf of Melissa Belvadi <mbelvadi at upei.ca>
Date: Thursday, November 18, 2021 at 9:57 AM
To: Fry, Amy <amyfry at illinois.edu>, Harper, Cynthia <charper at vts.edu>, Sarah Glasser <Sarah.Glasser at hofstra.edu>, eril-l at lists.eril-l.org <eril-l at lists.eril-l.org>
Subject: Re: [Eril-l] Cost per use from COUNTER 5 Ebook reports
Another reason to use unique_title_requests compared with unique_item_requests for ebooks is that some providers only allow the user download one chapter at a time, but others allow both individual chapter downloads and also the entire ebook as a single PDF. There has been a lot of debate about whether the provider should count that entire ebook download as just 1 item requested, or count the number of chapters and count that many. At this point, you can't know vendor by vendor which way they are handling that.  But you can count on unique_title_request to count it all as 1 use for sure.

Librarians have been debating the issue of print-circulation equivalency to ANY ebook metrics pretty much since ebooks became popular.
Unique_title_requests have been COP5's way of addressing at least some of the objections to drawing those equivalencies.
But I know some anti-ebook librarians are going to refuse to accept ANY metric.


Melissa Belvadi
Collections Librarian
University of Prince Edward Island
mbelvadi at upei.ca<mailto:mbelvadi at upei.ca>  902-566-0581
ORCID iD: 0000-0002-4433-0189



________________________________
From: Eril-l <eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org> on behalf of Fry, Amy <amyfry at illinois.edu>
Sent: Monday, November 8, 2021 6:02 PM
To: Harper, Cynthia <charper at vts.edu>; Sarah Glasser <Sarah.Glasser at hofstra.edu>; eril-l at lists.eril-l.org <eril-l at lists.eril-l.org>
Subject: Re: [Eril-l] Cost per use from COUNTER 5 Ebook reports


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In my experience, the numbers for unique title requests and total requests are very similar – unless they aren’t. If you look at the numbers month by month, they mostly correlate and then sometimes there will be one month where there’s WAY more in total, and I’m not quite sure why.



I think Cynthia is correct, that the way it counts unique uses is not precise enough to make that much difference. I don’t think unique would be like a print circulation – I wouldn’t compare those numbers directly for sure. I have usually gone with total, myself, assuming a use is a use, whether it’s by the same person or not.



I think this is one of the things that makes COUNTER 5 so confusing – instead of clearing up confusion, the additional data just creates more questions and makes me not sure what to think.



I think as long as you’re consistent in which count you use, and don’t try to compare the numbers to COUNTER 4, then you’re doing the best you can.



I like to see how many titles are used, myself, and maybe how many months they got used. Neither of those are official COUNTER numbers, but I think they give me a better picture of how the ebooks are doing (compared to other ebooks) and how likely they are to be used again than how many item requests one book gets in one year, given how weird that number can be.



Amy Fry

Associate Professor, E-Resources Management Librarian

Acquisitions & Cataloging Services

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

217.265.9480

amyfry at illinois.edu<mailto:amyfry at illinois.edu>

https://experts.illinois.edu/en/persons/amy-lynn-fry<https://nam11.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexperts.illinois.edu%2Fen%2Fpersons%2Famy-lynn-fry&data=04%7C01%7Csteve.oberg%40wheaton.edu%7C4d480f2e41be48a8285908d9aaac138a%7Cb7098c8ac6b24e8bba4c872cf5f00a20%7C0%7C0%7C637728478454585580%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C0&sdata=WTR36LOM2SWvz7M4p7ROyDsHsY9CoZR0oYY2pQBam88%3D&reserved=0>



From: Eril-l <eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org> On Behalf Of Harper, Cynthia
Sent: Monday, November 8, 2021 2:39 PM
To: Sarah Glasser <Sarah.Glasser at hofstra.edu>; eril-l at lists.eril-l.org
Subject: Re: [Eril-l] Cost per use from COUNTER 5 Ebook reports



But none of the COUNTER 5 metrics can show that person A used Ebook X for 5 sessions, and person B used it over 8 different sessions, and count that as 2 uses, correct?



Thanks,

Cindy



From: Sarah Glasser <Sarah.Glasser at hofstra.edu<mailto:Sarah.Glasser at hofstra.edu>>
Sent: Monday, November 8, 2021 3:22 PM
To: Harper, Cynthia <charper at vts.edu<mailto:charper at vts.edu>>; eril-l at lists.eril-l.org<mailto:eril-l at lists.eril-l.org>
Subject: RE: Cost per use from COUNTER 5 Ebook reports



Hi Cindy,



At my library we decided to use the metric Unique_Title_Request for e-books because it is more in line with a print book circulation (i.e. a use of the book regardless of whether the patron used one or ten chapters). I think the unique-item-requests counts chapter/section use (the “item” can be either an entire book or a chapter).  On page 10 of the Friendly COUNTER 5 guide for books (attached – not sure attachment will come through distribution list but sending to your email too), it suggests using the Unique_Title_Request for calculating cost per usage.



Hope this helps.



Best regards,

Sally

**************************************
Sarah (Sally) Glasser
Serials and E-Resources Librarian
Axinn Library-Hofstra University
Hempstead, NY  11549

From: Eril-l <eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org<mailto:eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org>> On Behalf Of Harper, Cynthia
Sent: Monday, November 8, 2021 3:07 PM
To: eril-l at lists.eril-l.org<mailto:eril-l at lists.eril-l.org>
Subject: [Eril-l] Cost per use from COUNTER 5 Ebook reports



EXTERNAL MESSAGE

Hello – I am just realizing I may not be computing the unique titles used/requested for an ebook resource properly.



In the past, I have taken the number of titles mentioned in a TR report as the unique ebooks – what we would have had to purchase as firmorders if we wanted to replace the use we got from the subscription.



At first, I thought that that’s what Unique_Item_Requests represented when I started using COUNTER 5 Report Tool. Now that I read the definition, I’m not so sure.  I haven’t gone back in and compared the number of titles in my TR report to the Uniquet_Item_Requests in my PR reports, but I suspect they’re not the same. And if I had used Unique_Title_Requests, would that have been better? Can anyone shed light on this please?





EBOOK USAGE AND COST PER USE











Jan-Oct.

10-month price

Jan-Oct.



platform

data_type

metric_type

year

reporting_period_total

subscr price

Firmorder cost 2021

Cost per Use

BloomsburyCollections

Book

Unique_Item_Requests

2021

92



$ 95.00

$ 33.19

Brill

Book

Unique_Item_Requests

2021

1





$ -

Cambridge Core

Book

Unique_Item_Requests

2021

146



$ 9.18

De Gruyter Platform

Book

Unique_Item_Requests

2021

6





$ -

EBSCOhost

Book

Unique_Item_Requests

2021

5230



$ 1,307.81

$ 1.10

Grove Music Online

Book

Unique_Item_Requests

2021

9





$ 190.56

JSTOR

Book

Unique_Item_Requests

2021

47



$ -

Manchester University Press

Book

Unique_Item_Requests

2021

6





$ -

Oxford African American Studies Center

Book

Unique_Item_Requests

2021

11



$ 85.91

Oxford Biblical Studies Online

Book

Unique_Item_Requests

2021

274





$ 6.28

Oxford Bibliographies

Book

Unique_Item_Requests

2021

33



$ 10.83

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Book

Unique_Item_Requests

2021

34





$ 45.64

Oxford English Dictionary

Book

Unique_Item_Requests

2021

735



$ 0.54

Oxford Handbooks Online

Book

Unique_Item_Requests

2021

178





$ 8.82

Oxford Reference

Book

Unique_Item_Requests

2021

1



$ -

Oxford Research Encyclopedias

Book

Unique_Item_Requests

2021

6





$ -

Oxford Scholarship Online

Book

Unique_Item_Requests

2021

11



$ -

ProQuest

Book

Unique_Item_Requests

2021

3





$ -

ProQuest Ebook Central

Book

Unique_Item_Requests

2021

3036



$ 2,831.94

$ 3.41

Project MUSE

Book

Unique_Item_Requests

2021

1218



486.25

$ 1.77

Wiley Online Library

Book

Unique_Item_Requests

2021

2



$ -





Cindy Harper

Electronic Services and Periodicals Librarian

Virginia Theological Seminary, Box 159

3737 Seminary Road

Alexandria, VA 22304

charper at vts.edu<mailto:charper at vts.edu>

(703)461-1794



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