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Librarians who get delivery of electronic products on the American Psychological Association’s PsycNET platform have ready access to usage statistics for their institution through a password-protected page on the APA web site. APA gathers and presents statistics in compliance with COUNTER.
As electronic resources have grown in size, importance, and percentage of library spending, both producers and purchasers have agreed that use of these resources must be measured in some consistent way. Purchasers need the ability to measure their use of a variety of products, and producers need to know how their content is being used. Over time there had been some fledgling attempts to develop at least minimum standards, but there were no full standards with common definitions. Then in 2002 COUNTER, or Counting Online Usage of NeTworked Electronic Resources, emerged to develop an agreed upon international set of standards.
In 2003 COUNTER was formally established as a not-for-profit company, Counter Online Metrics, and began inviting membership. APA has been a member since then.
In January 2003 COUNTER issued Release 1 of the COUNTER Code of Practice for Journals and Databases. Release 2 of the COUNTER Code of Practice for Journals and Databases followed in April 2005.
For delivery of its electronic content on APA PsycNET, APA is fully compliant with Release 1. For Release 2, we are not yet fully compliant on the Auditing Requirements. We estimate we will have the content areas of session count and per-journal reports on the librarian’s reference desk statistics completed by January 2006.
For more information, visit the COUNTER website.
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