Here’s an informative and sobering assessment of employing COUNTER (via SUSHI or not) stats for accurately measuring cost per use at the platform/database/journal level… It’s not a pretty picture.
Welker, J. (2012). Counting on COUNTER: The current state of e-resource usage data in libraries. Computers in Libraries, 32(9). Retrieved from http://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/nov12/Welker–Counting-on-COUNTER.shtml.
Thanks to Roland for sending this my way.
Thanks for pointing out this article. Nice to know we’re not alone in our suffering. And the author doesn’t even discuss the problems of vendors totally screwing up. Our Gale JR1 stats dropped from 390,000 in 2012 to 222,000 in 2013, to 13,000 in 2014. Why? We stopped using our federated search tool and Gale stopped using COUNTER 3, which for some reason wildly over-counted our downloads when accessed through federated search. Makes no sense to me at all but it sure messed up our usage stats. –Bonnie Nelson, John Jay
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