RE: COUNTER: current status and advice to users

["Rick Anderson" <rickand@unr.edu>]

> Excuse my ignorance, but would someone please explain to me why 
> anyone cares about usage statistics for books? I can understand 
> that usage statistics for journals might enter into decisions 
> about whether to continue subscriptions, but what decisions 
> follow from book usage statistics?

For journals and databases, usage statistics give us some help in 
deciding whether or not to continue subscribing to individual 
titles.  For books, usage statistics are more interesting in the 
aggregate -- they can tell us how much of our book collection is 
being used, how frequently it's being used, and (potentially most 
useful of all) how usage patterns are distributed among the 
subject areas.  You're correct in pointing out that once a book 
is purchased, the purchasing is over for that title.  But we keep 
buying books from that publisher, or on that subject, and being 
able to see usage trends can help us shape future purchasing 
behavior.

The usefulness of usage statistics is limited, of course, just as the 
usefulness of any tool is limited.  But they do provide one important 
part of the picture.

---
Rick Anderson
Dir. of Resource Acquisition
Univ. of Nevada, Reno Libraries
(775) 682-5664
rickand@unr.edu