Data Standards

This blog post is going to be a little bit different - just reading notes this week. I gave a presentation on Find It on Friday and we worked on an activity involving COUNTER. So, here are the things we read to prepare ourselves for class:

"Library Standards and E-Resource Management: A Survey of Current Initiatives and Standards Efforts" by Oliver Pesch

- the e-journal life cycle! acquire - provide access (i think Find It fits under this part) - administer - support - evaluate - renew: remember, each step in the e-journal life cycle takes a lot of time and work, and it's an on-going process.

- requires working with multiple vendors and different systems

- so, we use the help of:

NISO (National Information Standards Organization)

Editeur - focused on international standards for e-commerce of books and journal subscriptions

COUNTER - usage statistics!

DLF - digital library federation

ICEDIS - works at the publisher and vendor level to develop a set of standards

UKSG (United Kingdom Serials Group)

Just a few notes for "Standards for the Management of Electronic Resources" (Yue)

- Standards = interoperability, efficiency, and quality!

- the largest area of growth for libraries has been in e-journals, and without an initial set of standards at the onset of this area, different formats and ways of managing serials emerged.

- ONIX as the first electronic assessment tool for serials

- MARC and ER = square peg in a round hole. We need XML! Can I quote Steve Paling on this? Yes, "MARC must die!"

- OpenURL - works well for linking to full text. Static URLs don't work in this case because of the fluid nature of the e-journal market. Now we have the openURL resolution system known as SFX where a source is directed to a target by a link resolver.

COUNTER Current developments and future plans and our COUNTER activity:

- the main goal of libraries/librarians is not to spend their days looking at and finding usage statistics - COUNTER makes this easier for them

- COUNTER report format - requires vendors to provide only reports ‘relevant’ to their product(s) - most supply only a few report types.

JR1 - # of successful full-text article requests by month and journal
J1a for subscription archives
JR2 - turnaways by month and journal (due to simultaneous user limit)
uncommon -
JR3 (optional) - number of successful item requests and turnaways by month, journal and page type.
JR4 (optional) - total searches run by month and service
JR5 - number of successful full-text article requests by year and journal

Database Reports:
DB1 total number of searches and sessions by month and database
DB2 turnaways by month and database
DB3 total number of searches and sessions by month and service (branded group of online info products)

Consortium Reports
CR1 # of successful full-text article/e--book requests by month
CR2 # of searches by database

report format compliance (manual review)
article request counting (test scripts)
database session/search counting (test scripts)

- Don’t account for: automated search filtering (bots, crawlers, LOCKSS, etc)
HTML vs PDF downloads - some services display HTML full-text along with abstract - is this a “download?”

We also covered CORE (cost of resource exchange) and SUSHI (Standard Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative)

“Library Standards and e-resource management”

- E-Journal lifecycle:

- 1. Acquire: titles, prices, subscriptions, license terms, etc.

- 2. Provide access: cataloging, holdings lists, proxy support, searching and linking

- 3. Administer: use rights and restrictions, holdings, title list changes

- 4. Support: contacts, trouble shooting

- 5. Evaluate: usage data, cost data

- 6. Renew: title lists, business terms, renewal orders, invoices (groups help create standards as management resources)

“Standards for the Management of ER”

- Promote interoperability, efficiency, and quality

- Another way to look at the lifecycle:

- 1. Selection

- 2. Acquisition

- 3. Administration

- 4. Access control

- 5. Assessment

“COUNTER: Current Developments and Future Plans”

- Usage statistics as part of the librarian’s toolkit

- Vendors have a practical standard for usage stats on their major product lines

- Standard usage stats Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI): automated retrieval of the COUNTER usage reports into local systems (part of the XML schema) will indicate the intensity of use of a database, popularity of a database.

- Journal usage factor: total usage (COUNTER JR1 Data)/total # of articles published online (within a specific date range)

- PIRUS: Publisher and Institutional Repository Usage Statistics: an invaluable tool in demonstrating the value of individual publications and entire online collections.