Who is COUNTING? A publishing company support team’s quest to understand the diverse ways librarians acquire, analyze, and disseminate usage statistics

Background: As librarians on a support team at a publishing company, we provide usage statistics for customers and basic assistance analyzing the data. The recent transition from COUNTER 4 to COUNTER 5 left us confused about COUNTER 5 and more aware of our need to gain a better understanding of usage statistics in general. We sought insight into how well librarians understand COUNTER 5, which usage reports librarians are using, and how publishing companies can better support librarians’ analysis of usage data.

Description: The team began by creating a usage statistics task force to interview librarians at various institutions. We recruited volunteers for 30-minute interviews to discuss which usage reports they pull, what they consider “good usage,” if they share usage statistics with internal or external stakeholders, and how we can better support them throughout this process. While helpful, interviews require a significant time commitment from the librarians and our team. To gather more information, we created a survey that we plan to distribute to several library listservs. The survey builds upon the interview questions and asks how librarians are calculating cost-per-use, if they are using pivot tables or other tools to manipulate data, and if they are defining good usage differently this year than they did prior to the pandemic or seeing any other pandemic-related trends.

Conclusion: While we do not have the ability to change how our company reports usage, our goal was to gain insight into ways our team can better support librarians throughout the statistics collection process. From the librarians we interviewed and surveyed, there was a wide range of responsibilities surrounding usage statistics, as well as a range in how deeply librarians are analyzing data. Based upon what we learned from this project, we created Excel templates that enable librarians to easily graph their usage statistics to share data with leadership and other stakeholders. We also identified key actions we can take, such as implementing proactive outreach to provide login information for users to download their own usage reports for our products