Many people responded that they were in the same quandary and I was, but only a few people had some suggestions.  A big Thank You to Dan Tonkery and Christina Cool for their suggestions.  I have emailed Peter about getting Sessions re-included in the Counter Reports, but for the meantime I am looking at incorporating the Result Clicks into our Usage analysis – though year-to-year analysis within the same product is now virtually impossible without the same type of statistic. 

As Christina said, it is definitely a work-in-progress.

Dan:

Counter is discontinuing the Session Count because it was not a very consistent metric and many publishers were reporting this figure under very different hosting conditions.  So the bottom line this data was not reliable.

However I think the sessions should be better defined and could be made useful metric.  I would suggest that someone in library land lead an effort to let Counter understand that you need this metric.  COUNTER is very responsive to their user community.  In most cases that is the publishers as most librarians do not make demands on COUNTER.

I would contact Peter and ask for the inclusion of the Session count.  It will take several librarians to make the change so you need to find some others with similar interest.

• Peter Shepherd, Project Director: pshepherd@projectCounter.org

Christina:

I’ve started using the DB1 option and specifically tracking the Regular Search and Result Clicks to narrow down how many times a user will make that step to click-through on a result.  Like anything though, my usage statistics seem to be a work-in-progress.  It’s increasingly difficult to compare apples-to-apples when most of my vendors are utilizing COUNTER 4, and yet there are the select few still emailing me their own results like “page views”. 

It will be interesting – and I’m sure frustrating – to see how this continues to progress.

Now that more vendors are enacting COUNTER 4 reports, what are people doing about the lack of session reporting?  Like Dale, the Session count is extremely useful to me -- especially in our EBSCO databases because SmartLinking greatly inflates the number of searches, but a session is *supposed to* only be recorded once for the initial access.

Full-text downloads are great but only tell me if someone found something useful – it won’t help me determine if a lot of students go into the database but leave because they can’t find what they want.  And they don’t do me any good for our Indexes (indices?).

Thanks,

Nancy

Wouldn’t you know, just when I think I have a metric (session) that makes a connection between database usage and information literacy (expresses the need for information), the metric is going to disappear. What good is a search number without a session number? They might as well just use the retrievals or lack thereof and be done with it.

I had also been noticing greater numbers of sessions than searches, so it is helpful to know the link-resolvers are the culprits.

Dale

(Ms) Dale LaBonte

Coordinator of Library Serials and Electronic Resources

Alden Library | Quinsigamond Community College

670 W Boylston Street | Worcester MA 01606

508 854-7472 | dlabonte@qcc.mass.edu

From: SERIALST: Serials in Libraries Discussion Forum [mailto:SERIALST@list.uvm.edu] On Behalf Of Jill Emery
Sent: Monday, July 16, 2012 4:18 PM
To: SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU
Subject: Re: [SERIALST] COUNTER DB1 sessions vs searches

In Counter Code of Practice version 4, sessions will no longer be reported. Publishers/providers have 18 months to enact the new version which was released in April 2012. This means session reporting will go away in the near future.

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