Practical Considerations in the Standardization and Dissemination of Usage Statistics

The importance of usage statistics has risen with the increasing prevalence of electronic resources. The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) E-Metrics Project, 1 the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC) guidelines, 2 and the Counting Online Usage of NeT-worked Electronic Resources (COUNTER) initiatives, 3 among others, have made great strides toward achieving the goals of having uniform definitions of terms involved in usage statistics, and having more uniformity among publishers and aggregators providing those statistics. However, such initiatives operate on a macro level while individual libraries deal with usage statistics on a micro level. The statistical environment has changed and continues to change, but the fact remains that each library must formulate its own approach toward processing, standardizing, and disseminating usage statistics, whether this involves manual labor, in-house design and/or creation of a “data farm,” in which external database software is adopted, or some combination of these solutions. This chapter will discuss issues to be considered in the processing, standardizing, and dissemination of usage statistics, regardless of the method utilized, with relevant comments interlaced within the text, arising from the recent micro level statistical review conducted by Colorado State University Libraries (CSUL).