Guidance on Counting Federated Searches in Primo VE

[Flo Benincasa]

Hello ARL-ASSESS colleagues,

We are currently gathering data for the ARL Statistics membership application and are seeking guidance on Question 20 – Number of Federated Searches. Our library uses Primo VE as our discovery platform, and we are looking for best practices on what should be counted as a federated search and how to extract this information accurately from Primo VE.

If your library has experience reporting this metric or has suggestions on methods or tools to capture it, your guidance would be greatly appreciated.

Here is the definition:

Question 20. Number of federated searches (databases).

Items reported should follow definitions as defined in the COUNTER 5 Code of Practice (https://www.projectcounter.org/release-5-code-practice/). The COUNTER 5 report that corresponds to Question 20 is DR_D1 Searches_Federated. Metric options include “Searches_Federated”, “Total_Item_Requests for full text databases”, and “Total_Item_Investigations for non-full text databases”.  If a combination of these metrics must be used to capture all the federated search data at your institution, please sum the numbers accordingly, provided the information is not duplicative, and indicate in a footnote. The goal is to capture the totality of federated searches. In a footnote, please include the types of resources for which you are reporting data, and please specify the COUNTER 5 metric used to report this value. 

Thank you in advance for your help!

Best regards,
Flo Benincasa Library 

Data Analyst – Planning & Assessment
University Libraries, UNLV
flo.be...@unlv.edu
702-895-1964