Coming soon: new guides!

Last week we released new videos for many of our Friendly Guides, but that’s not the only project we’ve been working on. You’ll remember that when we updated our education pages earlier this year, we asked you what other topics you’d like to see. Unsurprisingly there were a lot of things on your lists!

More Friendly Guides

We’ll update the Friendly Guide to COUNTER for OA when our open access best practice is published, including a new video introduction. (If you’ve not replied to our OA consultation, please take a look and let us know what you think!). You also asked for more guides to syndicated usage, and AI metrics. Those will be coming later this year, though Tasha hasn’t written them yet. But don’t worry, there’s plenty of new stuff coming out soon…

New Deep Dives

Some of you might recall that we used to offer manuals for librarians. They went alongside the guides and dug a little deeper into specific topics. As part of our summer projects we’ve been working on replacements for those old manuals.

• Two are already out for review: databases and serials, including journals, conference proceedings, newspapers and magazines.
• We’ve drafted Books, including reference works. We only have one reviewer for this one, so if you want to help us out, please email Tasha.
• Only one person asked for a guide to streaming multimedia. It’s towards the end of the priority list and won’t come out until next year.

More Technical Introductions

Several of you thought that our Friendly Guide to Attributes, Elements and Other (Slightly) Techy Things was a good entry point to COUNTER tech, but that we need to do more for the really complicated stuff. Tasha cannot figure out how to make a truly friendly guide to things like the COUNTER API, so instead she’s creating Technical Introductions. We’ve got the Validator and the COUNTER API and JSON Schema in draft and under review by the Code Team. The Friendly Guide to Tech will also get a refresh and sit under the new Technical Introductions heading.

We’ve just started a big project to add more functionality to the COUNTER Registry, so we’ll create a Technical Introduction to that once the development is finished.

Get Involved

If you are able to help us out by reviewing Friendly Guides, Deep Dives, or Technical Introductions, or if there are more topics you think we should cover, please email Tasha.