Confession: My Standard Views Meltdown Moment

If you have spoken to me, written to me, or listened to any of my presentations since 2022, you have undoubtedly heard my passionate pleas for librarians to stop using standard views. Last week on Eril-L, I had what kind people will call a drama queen moment, and others might refer to as a standard views meltdown.

In this post I’ll pull back the curtain on why this issue pushes me to the brink. It helps to understand the problems standard views cause you, and how they are draining our limited resources.

Why Standard Views Are A Problem

Standard views (like your favourite TR_J1 and TR_B1) were never meant to be a permanent, comprehensive reporting mechanism. We designed the Platform, Database, Title and Item Reports in Release 5 to offer comprehensive and flexible reporting. To help libraries transition away from Release 4, we designed a selection of filters to mimic the old content-type-specific reports like JR1. Those filters were labelled standard views. With ten years of hindsight, I think we may have shot ourselves in the foot with that labelling: they’re not standard, they’re limited. By their very definition, they deliberately exclude large subsets of usage data. When you harvest a standard view, you are opting to see an incomplete picture.

Missing Data Types

The standard views were designed to mimic reports that were designed more than 15 years ago. That means newer types of content (like research data) simply don’t appear in any standard view. Looking at the TR_J series, which was designed for journals, we can see that old content types are missing too. TR_J views only show content with Data Type Journal. That means other serials like conference proceedings, magazines, and newspapers, don’t show up.

Missing Metric Types

No standard view includes the full set of relevant metrics. For example, in addition to missing non-journal serials, the TR_J1 excludes denial metrics. That means you have no way of knowing if your users are trying to access materials you’ve not licensed. The TR_J1 also excludes Total and Unique Item Investigations, so you can’t assess whether the content published in journals covered in the TR_J1 looks interesting on the surface, but not enough to read in full. But the shortcomings don’t stop there…

Missing Access Types

Library usage trends are shifting due to the rise of open access. Librarians regularly contact me to look into what they perceive to be worrying drops in their usage data. Often when we dig into the Title Report (TR), we discover that overall platform usage is completely stable. What looks like a fall is actually a successful shift from Controlled (subscription) to Open and Free_To_Read usage. Because standard views like TR_J1 and TR_B1 filter out open and free content entirely, it can look like your investment is failing. In reality, your library patrons are using more materials than ever – they’re just not subscription materials.

Missing Access Methods

OA has taken 20+ years to reach a tipping point in usage patterns. AI promises to upend user behaviour far more quickly. As publishers spin up their new AI metrics, these data points will only appear in COUNTER’s full reports. They will be completely absent from standard views. If you think perceived usage decreases with Access Type shifts from Controlled to Open are worrisome because you’ve missed them in a TR_J1, wait until you see what happens when you miss Access Method shifts from Regular (human) to Agent (AI).

If you need to know more about the differences between reports and the various standard views, take a look at our guide:

Why The Meltdown?

As you all know, COUNTER is tiny but mighty. With just one member of staff, and some incredible, dedicated volunteers, COUNTER supports a community of thousands of libraries and publishers worldwide. My job covers everything, from basic operations and accounts (membership renewal season is coming soon!), through developing educational materials (there are a few spots left on the February iteration of the Academy), to getting into GitHub and updating the Code. And of course, I respond to questions that come in from members and non-members alike.

To help identify and prioritise topics that need a more permanent space on the website, I track and classify the reporting questions that arrive in my inbox over the course of one week, every three months. The most common queries are about missing metrics, access types, or data types. Harvesting issues, another perennial query, typically means librarians are trying to harvest reports before they are ready. As you’ll see in the chart below, I reply to an average of nearly 50 report questions per week (plus several hundred other emails). Nearly 60% of those queries are solved by looking at the relevant report instead of a standard view. That is, a TR instead of a TR_J1.

Even with pre-canned responses, spending hours every week answering the same question is frustrating. More importantly, it takes time away from building the actual tools and education materials that move our community forward.

Help Me Help You

I absolutely empathise with the staff and time constraints facing small institutions. I appreciate that it may feel faster and easier to retain old workflows based on views – especially if you are still relying on manually harvested tabular reports. But if you have a problem with TR_J1, harvesting TR_J3 instead of a TR is not a good use of your time. Pull the TR and use simple spreadsheet tools like pivot tables to sum and filter the report to find the answers you need. Even better, switch up your workflow to harvest reports by default, delivering holistic usage data. Reports give you the granular control required to calculate return on investment and properly justify library spending to stakeholders.

Let’s leave the ghost of Release 4 behind. Protect your data, save my inbox, and please, from my knees: stop using standard views.