[Eril-l] COUNTER, video usage, "databases"

[Karlsen, Jeffrey]

I recently noticed that video titles we have licensed individually from Alexander Street Press (what they call “Single Title Sales” or STS) were not included in their COUNTER reports. When I inquired about this problem, I was told that because the STS titles are not part of a “database”, they could not be included in the COUNTER reports. Here is how they summarized it 6 weeks after I posed the question:

The reason is that COUNTER only measures database usage, and Single Title purchases are not in a database.

Of course it’s nonsense that these titles are not part of a database—ASP couldn’t provide access to them without maintaining a database. But it sounds like by “database” they mean a subscription collection like Academic Video Online. So I replied that this might be true for DR-type reports, but I couldn’t understand why they’d be excluded from IR-type reports.

We’ve had a bit of back-and-forth. Is there anything to what they’re saying? Is there something in COUNTER that would make a vendor think they couldn’t provide access to titles from a platform purely because of the way the video was licensed to the library? I can’t find anything suggesting this in the documentation but could have missed it.


--
Jeff Karlsen
Technical Services Librarian
Sacramento City College
916-558-2583
KarlseJ at scc.losrios.edu<mailto:KarlseJ at scc.losrios.edu>
Pronouns: he/him
https://scc.losrios.edu/library

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