Usage Reporting

 

Coherent Digital provides COUNTER compliant usage statistics for customers who have active subscriptions or who pay maintenance fees. To get statistics for your institution please contact information@coherentdigital.net

What is COUNTER?

Project COUNTER is an industry initiative that provides guidelines for the measurement, creation, and distribution of online usage reports to institutional subscribers. See http://www.projectcounter.org for more information. We are fully compliant with the  COUNTER Code of Practice for E-Resources: Releases 4 and 5.

What are the features associated with COUNTER Release 4?

The COUNTER Release 4 standards contain the following features to improve the delivery of consistent, credible, and comparable usage statistics:

  • A single, integrated Code of Practice covering journals, databases, books and reference works.

  • An expanded list of Definitions, including terms such as ‘record view’, ‘result click’, as well as different categories of ‘access denied’, etc., that are used for the first time in Release 4.

  • Enhancements of the SUSHI (Standardised Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative) protocol designed to facilitate its implementation by vendors and its use by librarians.

  • A modified “Journal Report 5,” which reports on the usage of full-text article requests by year and by journal from a library’s acquired archival content.

  • Flexibility in the usage reporting period that allows you to specify a date range for your usage reports

What is SUSHI and how does it relate to COUNTER Release 4?

  • The SUSHI (Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative) protocol has been incorporated into the COUNTER Code of Practice

  • SUSHI has been developed by NISO (National Information Standards Organizations) in cooperation with COUNTER

  • SUSHI allows for the automated retrieval of the COUNTER usage reports into local systems, making the harvesting and aggregating of usage reports much less time consuming for the librarian or library consortium administrator

  • Several SUSHI client tools are currently available through various vendors

What are the features associated with COUNTER Release 5?

  • Release 5 of the COUNTER Code of Practice includes four Master Reports covering a very wide spectrum of activities:

    • Platform Master Report

    • Database Master Report

    • Title Master Report

    • Item Master Report

  • For ease of use, each of the Master Reports is associated with one or more summaries of particular types of activity, such as usage or access denials, called Standard Views.

  • In addition, each Master Report includes all of the COUNTER 5 metrics — investigations and requests, access denials, and searches, supplemented with a variety of attributes.

  • For a complete description of the features and examples in COUNTER 5 see The Friendly Guide to Release 5 for Librarians (PDF).