With shrinking budgets and more and more titles competing for the library dollar, sophisticated analysis of user habits is more important than ever. Collection management librarians perpetually strive for a means of assigning an ultimate value to each journal title. That value, known as cost per use (or CPU) has become the gold standard for determining what is kept in a journal collection.
CPU is determined by the price of a title divided by the number of uses in a year. In short, the lower the cost per use, the greater "bang for the buck." At journal review time, titles with a low CPU are looked at favorably, whereas titles with a high CPU are likelier targets for cancellation.
As user demand for e-journals increases, the challenge to accurately measure our web-based subscriptions must be met. Fortunately, industry standards have emerged in recent years to measure electronic use. Enter Project COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources). Launched in March 2002, COUNTER is “an international initiative designed to serve librarians, publishers and intermediaries by facilitating the recording and exchange of online usage statistics.” Representatives from Oxford University Press, Nature Publishing, Princeton and Cornell University are among the current Executive Committee members.
In December 2002, the first COUNTER Code of Practice was released. This document created the first industry standard for measurable usage categories, and clarified usage report content, format, and frequency, among other elements. Publishers making their electronic statistics available now must adhere to certain “COUNTER compliant” guidelines for distributing their data. Librarians can now measure such features as article downloads per title, reports by IP range, session turnaways, session length, among other categories.
To understand the impact of e-statistics, consider the CPU of one popular title:
Nature medicine - $899 print edition, receives 132 uses.
Total cost per use = $6.81
And with electronic statistics factored in from a “COUNTER compliant” publisher:
$899 print edition + $717 electronic edition = $1,616 total price
132 print uses + 3,235 electronic uses = 3,367 total use
Total cost per use - 48¢
Indeed, information is power. Print statistics paint only a partial picture of a title’s overall value. Reliable e-statistics help determine what titles best serve user needs, compare trends from year to year, and develop a rationale for where and how money is spent.
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