Library Answers: Los Rios Common Questions

Overdrive, despite marketing products to academic libraries, does not supply COUNTER-compliant reports, normally considered a standard feature of an academic product.

In order to more easily view our Overdrive usage, we are converting Overdrive's proprietary usage reports to COUNTER 5.1 format. Because Overdrive logs loans, not individual uses, we are considering these "unique title requests". We currently license audiobooks and in the future may license ebooks from Overdrive, and we also have the Magazines subscription. We are producing the following reports:

• TR_B1 - these show unique title requests for audiobooks and ebooks. COUNTER prefers audiobooks to be treated as books rather than streaming media, so we are not producing IR_M1.
• TR - these show unique title requests for audiobooks, ebooks, and magazines. Because the magazines are not scholarly, we are not producing TR_J1.

COUNTER does not seem to have an approved "Magazines" data type, so the data type for this content will be "Journal." Note that when we add the magazine MARC records to Alma, some of them show as ebooks because their periodicity is "one-time"—they are not serials. But for the purposes of usage reports, these one-time publications show as "journal".

The reports are converted using Library Open Workflows.

Retrieve the Overdrive usage report

1. Go to Overdrive Marketplace
2. Go to the Insights area via the top menu
3. On the left menu select Checkouts
4. Set report options
   • Checkouts by: Year (this will allow you to retrieve multiple months easily)
   • Date range: Specific
   • Start Date: set to first day of first month to be retrieved
   • End Date: set to last day of last month to be retrieved
   • All other fields: blank/no value (any needed filtering will be done when the file gets processed)
5. Click Update button. You will see a table showing the year and the total number of checkouts. (If you spanned a year, there will be two rows.)
6. Click the year. This will bring you the next page, which contains a row for each loan.
7. At the top of the table, click Export report. This will bring you to the Report exports page.
8. When the Status column shows Ready and the Download column shows a Download link, click Download.
9. Save the file to your computer. Do not open it. 

Produce the COUNTER reports

1. In Alma, click the Cloud Apps icon.
2. Select the Library Open Workflows app.
3. Select Generate Overdrive COUNTER Reports.
4. Click the Browse button and navigate on your computer to the file you saved above.
5. Select Report type: TR_B1.
6. Select Subscriber.
7. Click Submit.
8. Soon afterward you'll see the ending screen and be prompted to download a file with extension .json. Save it to your computer.
9. Click Restart.
10. Repeat steps 4-7 except selecting the second report type, TR.
11. Download the second file.

Upload to the vendor to Alma

1. Go to the vendor with code loverdrive.
2. Click the Usage tab.
3. Click Upload file.
4. Select one of the two files you produced above.
5. Select your college as the subscriber.
6. Click the Upload File button.
7. Repeat steps 4-6 for the other report.

Notes for Analytics

Overdrive has two platforms, Overdrive and Libby. The usage reports distinguish between these tow platforms, so the faux COUNTER reports do too. To see all Overdrive usage you will need to select both Libby and Overdrive as platforms.