Colleting usage reports

In the digital library setting usage data collection proved to be a difficult and time consuming task for librarians. With content provided from many different vendors, librarians would typically have to regularly access administration tools at each vendor’s website, identify and download the appropriate usage report, often with different formats from different vendors.

Quite often the usage reports could not be accessed online but had to be requested from vendors via email. These files were almost or at least very difficult to structure in a way that made it possible to use them for comparison and planning. And to there were a growing concern from libraries about how to trust the usage statistics collected by the vendors who presumably had an interest in high usage.

The most pressing issues related to usage data collection at this point was the many different formats, the amount of staff time allocated to the task and the issue of trust.