"I’d love to hear from a few vendors about why they have or have not become COUNTER compliant"

So wrote Todd Melnick, Associate Librarian for Public Services, Fordham Law School Library, in his May 21, 2012 CRIV Blog post titled Why Aren’t More Legal Information Vendors COUNTER Compliant? So far, no comments to the post from the vendor community.

Perhaps the "no reply" is because the poor souls in the vendor community who are assigned the task of monitoring law librarian blogs had not passed on the post to someone higher up the corporate communications food chain quickly because they don't know what COUNTER is. (Melnick did link to the relevant resources by the way.) Perhaps someone up in the corporate communications food chain is waiting on an answer from their techies. Perhaps those techies have bounched the question to some SVP of product and services type because they found the company could implement COUNTER but they are afraid that Das Company doesn't want to disclose the data that way. Perhaps the Librarian (Marketing) Relations team is still waiting to obtain a waiver of their company's "don't you comment to a blog post" ban.

Dear Colleagues

First I want to thank CRIV for launching The CRIV Blog and for giving me the opportunity to talk about database usage statistical systems in a medium that everyone can read now that I know The CRIV Blog exists.

Based on extensive customer input, our customers like spending huge amounts of cash on systems that provide usage stats at the database level. They do not want to discontinue using their systems out of fear that this niche industry would go out of business. Being in the solutions business ourselves, we never want to contribute to the demise of another service provider even if it meant our customers' funds could be better spent on retaining some of our products and services.

After multiple focus group sessions with customers who cannot afford a database usage stat solution, we learned that our customers like the customer experience and education of wrangling 12 months of stats about our legacy systems from us. Since COUNTER would eliminate that, we would be disappointing our customers if we implemented it. Obviously we are not in the business of disappointing our customers.

Thank you,

The Entire (what remains of) the Librarian (Marketing) Relations Team

In other words, a vendor no-rely to a post is a reply. And posting a question of interest for all to read and to see no replies forthcoming is a good thing. Keep posting CRIV! [JH]