In order to understand the needs of schools and departments they serve and assess relevance of their collections academic libraries conduct various evaluation projects. Columbia University Health Sciences Library is committed to performing regular reviews of the departments at the Medical Center. Part of those reviews includes analyzing e-book coverage and use.
COUNTER reports are the best tools libraries have to track e-resource usage, but lack of detail may cause problems when performing detailed, subject-based analysis of e-book collections. While COUNTER reports include standardized usage data, they lack all but the most basic of bibliographic information.
So, how to optimize library analysis of these reports on a subject-specific basis?
In this session the audience will learn the methodology used by HSL in two review projects. In a first project, HSL used advanced filtering in Excel to limit the Counter Report to titles relevant to a subject area under review, and then hand reviewed the list. In a second project, HSL developed a program to look up COUNTER-provided ISBNs via Z39.50, which provided additional bibliographic information for analysis.
The methodology used should be reproducible and applicable to any subject area in Sciences or Humanities
