Beyond COUNTER: Using IP Data to Evaluate Our Users

Traditional library statistics, whether counting our collections, our users, or our services, are typically concerned with answering questions such as “What?” or “How much?” or “When?” COUNTER-compliant statistics, the very welcome and useful standard for electronic resource providers, have allowed libraries to bring that same paradigm to bear on their digital collections, answering such questions as “What journals and e-books are our users downloading?” “How often are they searching this database?”, and even “When do they access this content?” However, what COUNTER and other traditional methods often fail to do is provide data that would allow libraries to answer questions such as “Who is using our resources?” and “Where are they when they access our licensed content?” By gathering detailed usage data by IP address from several electronic resource providers, and comparing those datasets with a well-developed network infrastructure, one can take steps to determine the “who” and “where” questions of e-resource usage at the University of Virginia.