WHAT HAS CHANGED?
In order to standardize product reporting across all Infobase products and provide the most accurate reporting metrics to customers, we have made the decision to sunset almost all product reports found in our admin portals and replace them with new, audited COUNTER compliant reports.
When you access your reports inside the admin portal, you will see two main report options underneath each product.
Legacy Reports -
All non-COUNTER certified reports have been grouped underneath this legacy reports menu. All of these reports will remain accessible in your account, but cannot be run any further out than 12/31/2018. Every legacy report will display a pop up as shown below with a hard coded end date of 12/31/2018.
COUNTER Reports -
This section will contain all certified, audited, COUNTER reports. You will have access to a variety of COUNTER 4 reports depending on the products you subscribe to. Coming very soon will be the addition of COUNTER 5 reports.
Specific details on the types of new reports offered can be found below and in subsequent linked help articles.
HOW DO THESE NEW REPORTS COMPARE TO THE OLD ONES?
Historically, Infobase database products have reports usage via the below three metrics:
- Sessions - denote logons to a database
- Searches - are a combination of keyword searches that are entered via our basic and advanced search options—and browse-able searches, which occur whenever a user clicks on any link that generates search results
- Item Requests - indicate pages and widgets that have been viewed/accessed
The COUNTER4 reporting standards utilizes the following metrics in its reports, which in most cases are very different from historical Infobase reports.
- Record View - These report the number of times the main article, video, image, audio file, interactive, etc, are viewed within the resource, irrespective of whether these records were reached from a set of search/browse results or via a link from an external source. Clicking on main navigational items or any index pages that do not load a piece content do NOT count as record views.
- Result Click -These report the number of times that users click on results from a given resource from the result list displayed by a search action.
- Regular Search - A user-driven intellectual query, typically equated to submitting the search form of the online service .to the server
Metric | Legacy Reports | New Reports |
Logins | Sessions | No longer valid |
Searches | Searches | Regular Search |
Views | Item Requests | Record View |
Results Clicks | NA | Result Clicks |
Why are logins no longer included?
The focus of COUNTER is on metrics that track usage of the content people are paying for, not the service around it. A login cannot be tied to any particular content and therefore doesn't reflect usage of the service. If there were no better metrics, it would be a useful surrogate, but COUNTER instead tracks many more-direct metrics, such as searches, investigations, record views etc.
For a More Detailed Explanation
Every Infobase product contains an article in its respective support center titled, "COUNTER R4 Event Tracking Explained for..."
This article will walk you through every page and action within a given product and explain in detail how the COUNTER metrics are recorded.
WHAT IS COUNTER?
COUNTER stands for Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources. Their website is at http://www.projectcounter.org/.
COUNTER was one of the first, if not the first, standards organization established for the modern
information environment. It has succeeded in bringing together a collaboration of publishers and
librarians to develop and maintain a standard for counting the use of electronic resources. It has
also ensured that most major publishers and vendors are compliant by providing their library customers around the world with COUNTER usage statistics.
COUNTER publishes the Code of Practice, which is the standard for counting the use of electronic
resources, and maintains a register of COUNTER-compliant vendors and publishers. Release 5 of
the Code of Practice, which is the subject of this Friendly Guide, is subject to continuous maintenance. As the release changes, this guide will be updated.
WHO USES COUNTER REPORTS?
The COUNTER standard was originally developed to provide a service to librarians and others who
purchase subscriptions to publishers’ content. The intention was to allow librarians to easily com-
pare their usage across different publishers’ content, and let them use that information to calcu-
late a cost-per-download for their subscriptions. COUNTER reports were not originally intended to
be used by publishers as a way of measuring usage across their client base, but are increasingly
being used for that purpose.
Academic libraries across the world use COUNTER reports to:
- Help them make renewal decisions or new purchasing decisions based on data about
usage and access denials - Inform faculty about the value of the library and its resources
- Understand user behavior and improve user experiences.
Most major vendors and publishers also use COUNTER reports to:
- Provide reliable and consistent usage data to their customers
- Upsell using COUNTER data about access denials
- Inform editors and authors about the usage of their publications
INFOBASE COUNTER COMPLIANCE STATEMENT
Infobase is listed as a Release 4 compliant publisher, under suppoted platforms.
Infobase will be supporting COUNTER 5 report formats along with offering SUSHI exporting.
LibLynx provides Publishers and Libraries with flexible, cloud-based Identity & Access Management solutions for their online resources. We make access management as simple as possible, and as secure as necessary, with usage-based pricing that scales with your needs. Our cloud-native applications are technology and platform independent, with an architecture designed to simplify integration and facilitate customization.
LibLynx is a paying member of COUNTER and is listed in the online register of Counter Compliant Publishers and Vendors.