Interview: Heather Staines, member of the Executive and Education Committees

Continuing our theme of interviewing key volunteers in the COUNTER community, in this latest post we hear from Heather Staines. Heather is a member of both the COUNTER Executive Committee and the Education Committee.

Who are you and who do you work for?

I’m Heather Staines, a Senior Consultant at Delta Think. I also serve as the Director of Community Engagement for our subscription Data & Analytics Tool. In addition, as part of my work with the International STM Association, I manage Publisher and Integrator Outreach for GetFTR and SeamlessAccess. I’m currently the immediate Past President for the Society of Scholarly Publishing. I’m also a Board Member of the library organization NASIG. Since around 2012, I’ve been part of Transfer, now a NISO Committee.

How are you involved with COUNTER?

I am a long-time COUNTER enthusiast. I’m currently a member of the COUNTER Executive Committee, after previously serving as a member of the Board of Directors. I’m also currently involved in the Education Committee.

When and why did you get involved?

COUNTER asked me to serve on the Board back in 2016. (The celebration was one to remember, resulting in my husband asking: What is this organization anyway?) From my previous roles working with publishers and libraries, I was aware of the importance of a standardized mechanism for tracking usage. This was one of the first broader industry initiatives that I got involved with. My participation helped me better understand the entire scholarly communications landscape and how it continues to evolve.

How has COUNTER grown and developed over the time you have been involved? 

I’ve seen COUNTER adapt to changes in how researchers discover and access content. This has particularly included the growth of Open Access content across this timespan. While it might seem like a simple or straightforward metric, COUNTER has had to contend with issues related to technology used by publishers and libraries. This ranges from Text and Data Mining to automated link checking by libraries, to the increase in popularity of new formats such as video. Each time COUNTER community reviews the Code, it is exciting to explore whether changes are necessary. We can always count on the public comments to put us through our paces.

Why is it important that COUNTER exists?

The kinds of content that libraries facilitate access to is expanding and evolving. But a way to assess the return on investment, financial or otherwise, across databases or content sets remains critical. COUNTER brings together the various stakeholders to have challenging conversations about technology and researcher workflow. It is especially interesting to see how global usage can help with understanding the impact of work. I think the pandemic taught a lot of folks in the humanities and social sciences about online usage and how important it can be for it to be as broad as possible.

What role do you anticipate COUNTER will play in the future?

Librarians are stretched so thin at the moment, each doing a multitude of different jobs. Many no longer have the luxury of time to dig deeply into usage questions in a way that they might have done routinely a decade or more ago. I hope COUNTER can help provide new tools and dashboards to help libraries better understand their researcher behavior so they can continue to provide access to the content that best serves their needs.