Emory and Stone in their article addressed the reasons libraries should do an annual review. Some of the reasons included renewal date, license changes, pricing model, price increase, DRM, and coverage changes.
The Emory and Stone article was organized with several major components of an annual review; schedule, costs and new conditions, usage statistics, stakeholders, and making your choice.
The section I focused in on was usage statistics. Several times the authors mentioned COUNTER compliant usage data. I looked at the website and appears to be an international collector of usage data for popular databases. If you were a large institution this could be a big benefit. As the article mentioned smaller content providers may not participate in COUNTER.
This article focused on large University systems, but usage statistics seems important for school libraries too, although on a much smaller scale. I probably focused more on qualitative than quantitative usage statistics. For example, I see on a daily basis which resources students and teachers use.
Quantitative measures are useful though in getting a clearer picture of database use. One of the arguments of LibGuides for MMSD is we could get internal statistics on our database use. One thing to keep in mind is that while there may be preferred entries to the databases, users may access by other means. For example, library websites or the Library Catalog itself. This takes me back to Galadriel Chilton mention of the importance of triangulation in reviewing usage data.
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