Circulation services are fundamental, immemorial responsibilities of a librarian. Lending, monitoring, and collecting statistics on the use of library materials are paramount in collection management. As scholarly resources migrate from print to digital, librarians cede more and more of their circulation responsibilities to publishers. The conventional source of e‐resource usage data is the web server. Librarians, having no access to the publishers’ web servers, are dependent upon each publisher to provide them with their own usage. While most publishers provide some form of usage reporting, it is estimated that as many as 30% do not. For those that do, the interoperability of what is provided varies considerably despite the prevalence of COUNTER.
Implementation of a SUSHI server is not trivial and many otherwise capable libraries have struggled to do so. For these reasons library staff can spend up to 6 weeks per year verifying holdings, performing link fault detection, collecting, consolidating, and analyzing usage statistics. The issues facing librarians for collecting accurate, verifiable and comprehensive usage data are varied. Utilizing a panel that includes an IT, collections, management and consortia administration perspective; discuss issues for librarians that make collecting and evaluation of usage data a difficult task, and review potential solutions – either internally developed, being tested, or obtained via external suppliers.
Key areas of discussion are pain points for librarians – holdings verification, gaps in types of materials monitored, appropriate link fault detection, and integration with system IT capabilities.
