Serials Solutions and the Art of Statistics Gathering

In 2000, a company named Serials Solutions was founded by a group of library entrepreneurs led by Peter McCracken, a librarian who had formerly worked at East Carolina State University and the University of Washington. McCracken and his team made one of the first significant attempts at corralling the increasingly vast array of paid, complimentary with print, and open-access electronic serials into a customizable database that could be manipulated and personalized by every subscribing library. This database initially presented libraries with a fairly limited ability to select groups of subscribed journal collections with default holdings dates, and these were, in turn, presented to library patrons in the form of static title lists of e-journals at their libraries. In these early days, there was little ability to customize features, and no capability at all to generate any kind of usage statistics.