A Report from NOTSL’s Spring 2022 Conference. A Dive into Data:

Librarians collect data to evaluate system performance, illustrate relationships between users and resources, create descriptive statistics, describe collections, identify commonalities and rarities in material usage, and for other goals or outcomes directed to improve library services. One common method of data collection is the COUNTER report. COUNTER acronym stands for: Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources. The report is based on a well-documented code of conduct; unlike publisher in-house reports that can be vaguely defined. The COUNTER initiative is a third-party, community-based code of practice, that is designed to control how publishers count and report usage of electronic resources.2 However, using the COUNTER report can be a daunting task and without manipulation, the data lacks a story. Analytic platforms are great at compiling data, but some are better than others at visualization.