At the end of May, Choice hosted a live webinar and panel discussion on granular usage reporting, sponsored by Elsevier.

The webinar discussed how federated-authentication may add further granularity and meaningful insights to COUNTER usage reporting within an institution.

The proposed model is similar in vein to our discussed Item Level Reports article but here focuses on using federated authentication to give a greater depth of understanding of the users by campus and demographics to integrate with usage reporting.

It’s a very interesting proposition for gaining additional breakdowns of usage reporting within an institution for where the users are using federated authentication and where the institution is able to provide robust, consistent attributes for the service.

It will be interesting to see how this model of granular reporting is received. For many institutions it will provide insight on a sample of the user base (as not all users will access via federated-authentication) and for many publishers it will offer challenges as attributes provided by individual institutions will not likely be consistent and comparable across multiple institutions, and the usage base will again only represent a sample of users.

Alternative models for understanding user types, roles and demographics with usage may be to use qualitative research of users within a platform and apply this sampling with usage. It’s a complex art used by the likes of Comscore for media planning but may, with industry participation, produce qualitative demographic information in combination with the established currency of trusted, quantitative usage data.

If you would like to explore these approaches and how they might work for you and your customers please contact stuart.maxwell@scholarlyiq.com.

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