[Eril-l] [EXT] question about COUNTER usage metrics

Mon Mar 31 16:15:58 PDT 2025

Sorry if I'm a bit late to this thread.
Project COUNTER has an excellent set of "friendly guides" and other help on their website:
https://www.countermetrics.org/education/metrics/

In general, use Unique_Title_Requests (UTR) for ebooks. For reference works, it depends on your purpose. If you want to know how many users/sessions used the ref work regardless of how many separate entries they looked at in a session, use UTR too. If you want to know how many different entries they looked at, use Unique_Item_Requests.
In general, avoid all of the title metrics that start with "Total" rather than Unique - the Total ones are there mostly to provide comparison with the COUNTER R4, but since we've had COUNTER R5 since 2019, it's unlikely anyone is still comparing R4 data - most librarians I've talked to about this tend to find 3 years of data most relevant.

The metrics with the word "Title" in their name rather than "Item" are just for books, not articles, because it allows you to consider the usage on the book as a whole, versus individual chapters.
With articles, usually librarians want to count separately each different article used, hence "items" which means articles.

Content Providers will tend to give you the most inflated metric, Total_Item_Requests if you don't specify otherwise, especially when doing things like the spendout process at the end of an EBA cycle. Always request Unique_Title_Requests instead unless you want chapter level usage AND you are happy to have the chapter counted multiple times if a patron keeps going to that same chapter multiple times within a session.

Melissa Belvadi
mbelvadi at upei.ca
Make an appointment: https://mbelvadi.youcanbook.me/
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Hi all,

I work a lot with setting up COUNTER for publishers and can speak briefly to an adjacent topic related to reference works in particular: But I also wondered if/when I should use title requests for reference works like encyclopedias.

In COUNTER 5.1 there are a few new data types that make it possible to track title usage for reference works of all kinds using the title metric of Reference_Work and item metric of Reference_Item. If the provider has set up their usage to track specific reference works inside of a database with both title and item metadata, you should be able to track this usage in the TR and the IR reports. As more publishers come online with 5.1, hopefully this title-item reporting will become more widely used.

Best,
Michelle

Michelle Urberg, PhD, MSLIS
Client Success Manager
michelle at liblynx.com<mailto:michelle at liblynx.com> | +1 202-888-3324 | www.liblynx.com<http://www.liblynx.com/>

On Thu, 20 Mar 2025 at 14:36, Electronic Resources in Libraries discussion list via Eril-l <eril-l at lists.eril-l.org<mailto:eril-l at lists.eril-l.org>> wrote:

As I see it, like so many things in life…that depends, specifically on the question being asked.  For example:

  *   How often is this resource used? (with “used” being as general and broad as possible)
     *   Searches_Regular may be enough, unless that resource is part of a federated search service, in which case, Searches_Federated would need to be added in.
  *   How much information is provided by this resource?
     *   Unique_Item_Requests (UIR) may be sufficient, but only if full text is provided.  That would leave out non-full-text information that is provided.
     *   Unique_Item_Investigations (UII) expands the scope of the information provided to include the abstract, the item record, linked outputs, as well as the full-text article.

For broad-scope evaluations of a variety of databases and resources, we’ve been using Unique_Item_Investigations as a the most common metric.  But if you were do evaluate a few resources that were similar, you could use more nuanced metrics, such as efficiency (ratio of UII divided by Searches, or UIR/UII), or CPU based on UII.

Those are my thoughts…I’m sure there will be others.

Karen R. Harker, MLS, MPH, MS Advanced Data Analytics

Collection Assessment Librarian

University of North Texas Libraries

Denton, Texas

940-565-2688

From: Eril-l <eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org<mailto:eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org>> On Behalf Of Electronic Resources in Libraries discussion list via Eril-l
Sent: Thursday, March 20, 2025 3:15 PM
To: eril-l at lists.eril-l.org<mailto:eril-l at lists.eril-l.org>
Subject: [EXT] [Eril-l] question about COUNTER usage metrics

Hi, I’d like to find out which metrics are used for which resource types.

I tend to use item requests for full-text databases and searches for index databases. Does that sound right?

But I also wondered if/when I should use title requests for reference works like encyclopedias.

Thanks.

Shulamis Hes

E-Collections Librarian/ Public Services Librarian

Yeshiva University Libraries

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