Authors:

Abstract

COUNTER: opportunities and challenges

Under the skilful leadership of Peter Shepherd and the COUNTER Board, COUNTER is securely fixed among publishers and librarians as the standard for reporting online usage.1 However, on the demand side of the fence, there are serious impedi- ments to making use of the COUNTER reports. The formatting of the delimited reports (either comma-separated or in Excel) is widely variable across publishers, which makes processing them automatically difficult or impossible. Though steps are being taken to make the reports more con- sistent, COUNTER reports are not yet available in a consistent data ‘container’. The administrative cost of individual provider-by-provider down- loads is also high. To make complete use of the reports, library staff must log into each and every one of their different providers, navigate to the right page, then download the appropriate report to their hard drive. Then it is up to the library staff member to consolidate the individual report with all the others and for all the other months.