i eagerly read the draft release 3 of project counter yesterday, hoping that there would be a mention of title standardization, but alas. the things that release 3 will do are fantastic: counting archive usage as a separate stat, database reports counting federated searches differently than single user searches, and removing stats generated by spiders are the big changes to the standard. maybe in release 4 we can deal with title standardization?
at my university our library subscribes to some e-journals and the main campus library subscribes to others. when it comes time to look at usage statistics i really only want to look at the titles i subscribe to, but publishers and aggregators supply all of our titles in one giant report. this means that i need to run a program of my titles against the vendor reports of usage for the campus as a whole to pull out statistics only for my titles. this can be simply done if there is one field in each report that can be matched. as the program runs, if the field from each report doesn’t match the information drops out. here’s a simple example of why this is a problem:
HighWire reports usage statistics for the e-journal titled Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America as “PNAS.” If I try to join my title list and HighWire’s list using the ‘title’ field as the matching field, the statistics for the Proceedings drop out because the two titles are different, i.e. there is no match. the Proceedings happens to be our third highest used e-journal, but if I had used an automated system to match titles the statistics for that journal wouldn’t have been reflected at all.
since titles aren’t a good matching field, i considered e-issn. of course not all e-journals have e-issns, so matching on this field is out. print issns present the same problem, as many e-journals are now only being published online and don’t have a print counterpart. so what field can be matched? there isn’t one at the moment. it makes the most sense to me to standardize the title data.
