Analysis and opinion: Metrics
Granular stats drill deeper into content usage Rob Scaysbrook says libraries can get more from COUNTER reports, thanks to a recent analytics tag, while community-agreed standards help protect privacy
As a library or information manager for a large organisation, you know how important it is to understand the different types of usage of the licensed resources you invest in.
That said, understanding the different
ways your users are making use of the content they are consuming can be tricky – even when you are using the COUNTER standard to help compare usage statistics in a consistent way. For example, if a group of postgraduate learners in a single faculty are making use of a B2B journal to inspire business case study ideas, that’s a high- value interaction with content – but it may be hard to capture in organisation-wide usage stats. Conversely, if you have several corporate
departments in a business who all rely on a technical news source, you might struggle to know how to allocate it fairly to internal budgets; it might be the R&D team rather than marketing, for example, who use it most. And while no statistic can be a substitute for your own expertise, it’s helpful to have some nuance, or granularity, in your usage data, so you can apply more evidence to your decision-making. That’s why, at OpenAthens, we
see value in a recently adopted data attribute that offers granular usage reporting for customers who use the COUNTER standard. This attribute, known as
eduPersonAnalyticsTag, has been adopted by the REFEDS group – which develops and adopts technical standards for federated single sign-on in the research and education community.
Adding value to federated access The name of the new attribute might be a bit of a mouthful, but at OpenAthens, we believe it’s a useful addition to the reporting you can get via federated access. It works by building on one of the great strengths of federated access – namely that it’s you, the identity provider, who should remain in control of the data you share. In other words, as a librarian or
knowledge manager, you choose what information you release to publishers for
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specific purposes. This offers a double advantage: not only can you start to design your own reporting based on the group categories you choose, but, importantly, you have control over privacy. With federated access, the authentication data of individual users is not shared directly with publishers. Effectively, it’s your organisation that authenticates the user, as part of a network of trust. If you want publishers to be able to
provide you with more granular data about usage for the purposes of reporting, then you would need to share more information with them – but only to the degree that you allow. Indeed, to help preserve privacy, the REFEDS standard for the eduPersonAnalyticsTag attribute advises that that granularity should be “coarse enough to prevent unintentional identification of subjects”. Data consistency is important
too. So it’s also helpful that eduPersonAnalyticsTag is COUNTER- compliant – making it a consistent and comparable way to count the use of online resources. If you use OpenAthens for reporting, then be aware that COUNTER reporting is different; while OpenAthens reports on activity at the moment users log in, COUNTER covers what happens after they gain access. But importantly, this COUNTER-compliant tag is supported by OpenAthens.
In practice, the eduPersonAnalyticsTag
has already been in a pilot phase, with “glowingly positive” feedback from customers so far, according to Nicolai Humphreys, senior product manager at Elsevier, the first publisher to deliver the new attribute via federated access.
Piloted by Elsevier Elsevier began piloting it in April 2022 for its ScienceDirect service – using it with 10 customers, including both corporations and organisations in education and healthcare. Two of the pilot customers were
also customers of OpenAthens, and we partnered with Elsevier for the eduPersonAnalyticsTag project. A significant driver for the pilot, Humphreys says, was demand from users of licensed content: “We were getting customers saying: ‘We like the COUNTER reports, but we want to know more; we have requests about unpacking the data and making it more explicit to our needs. “So we thought: what can we do to help them analyse their data better? Let’s enable the customer to set up the categories for their reporting, and we can ingest the information into our system and provide reports which they can then break down.” COUNTER, he says, became the basis
for that. The tag is presented as an extra column in a COUNTER-compliant report, letting customers break down data further
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