2018-12-17 Reporting SIG notes

Michael Winkler

Today's notetaker: Angela Zoss

Last week's notetaker: Kevin Walker

Annika Schröer from the ERM eUsage Subgroup will provide a demonstration of the eUsage app and discuss reporting needs related to this endeavor, such as using the Library Reporting Database (data warehouse). See JIRA ticket UXPROD-576 for more information.

Wiki page - eUsage

Usage of electronic materials is measured by journal providers, who often distributed data in COUNTER (standard), either manual download or automatic using SUSHI (protocol)

Aggregators may also download statistics for an entire institution, so may be downloading from aggregator instead of provider

Can download statistics into the FOLIO eUsage app, ready for Q4 FOLIO release

App includes "Statistics" which provides reports for each month

Eventually want to view visualizations of statistics calculated for the reports, create and download custom reports

Question: may need to connect to other apps. Should eUsage app ingest data from other apps, or should eUsage data get pulled into LDP for reporting?

Currently using JSON for all data (some starts as XML instead, but eventually will be JSON in COUNTER 5)

Nassib: does look like a good use case for LDP, but we'll have to go into more detail

App should support anyone using COUNTER, but also hope to develop a way to ingest non-COUNTER data (though that may pose problems with interpretation, if non-COUNTER data measures usage differently)

From ERM member - almost giving up on SUSHI because the data that come over often have trouble, and also there are providers who claim to be COUNTER-compliant but aren't really. For non-COUNTER compliant providers, may be able to map that into a "fake" COUNTER format to ingest, but the inconsistencies with COUNTER-compliant providers are big issues. Also have titles excluded from reports if there is no usage. Also, if we're moving to JSON, what about historical non-JSON reports? Hopefully at least 3 years into past.

For titles with no usage, they should still appear because this will connect to agreements in ERM app, so if there is an ISSN, you know what journals should be there, even if the usage data doesn't contain the title.

In connection with that is the problem of cost per use, so when there is zero usage, we get error messages in the reports. (Yes, they can address this.)

History is a problem - COUNTER 4 and COUNTER 5 will not be comparable, so that's a big problem moving forward. XML vs. JSON isn't as big of a problem, it can be transformed. But COUNTER 5 really is different metrics.

Interpretation has always been tricky, look more for trends (e.g., spikes) than raw numbers

Maybe report can be clear about the difference between COUNTER 4 and COUNTER 5

Current app supports both COUNTER 4 and COUNTER 5, but we don't know of any providers using COUNTER 5 yet

Can app identify illegal usage - scraping, for example? Maybe not in core app, but in a plugin. Some libraries don't want to omit those numbers, but might still want to identify it.

Reporting vs. eResources usage - aside from cost/use, reporting is important for annual stats to ACRL, IPEDS. Just look at entire year and report that total as "circulation" for eResources. ERM can be complicated, but having a place to gather everything and just get a total will be very helpful. (Yes, that will definitely be a canned report. There will be both canned reports and custom reports in the app.)

Sharon Beltaine will send Annika the master spreadsheet so she can look through for reports that relate to COUNTER (on import/export tab)

Might be good to prioritize COUNTER reports - some systems are only JR1, though SUSHI is everything now; do already have some prioritization in the spreadsheet

Annika Schröer, Sharon Beltaine, and Nassib Nassar will talk about details