Serials Solutions® Announces SUSHI Support through the 360 Counter E-Resource Assessment Service
Serials Solutions has successfully tested and deployed SUSHI, the Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative, with its 360 Counter e-resource assessment service. Support for SUSHI in 360 Counter will allow librarians to bypass time-consuming,manual data aggregation of usage statistics and to quickly analyze a title’s usage and its cost per-use.
The SUSHI protocol was developed to allow librarians to circumvent the process of downloading, aggregating, and formatting COUNTER-compliant usage reports from vendor websites.Many libraries do not have the staffing to manually retrieve their usage statistics, yet they still need the data to evaluate their e-resource expenditures. SUSHI enables Serials Solutions to retrieve COUNTER reports directly from vendors and upload them to 360 Counter. SUSHI-enhanced 360 Counter means that the customer may go straight to usage analysis and bypass the manual labor.
“Implementing SUSHI brings Serials Solutions one step closer to automating the entire usage assessment process, from acquisition and aggregation of reports to cost-per-click analysis,” says Susan Golden, Product Manager. “Every publisher who implements SUSHI ensures that the library community can do better work, faster and easier.”
From 2009 it is planned that SUSHI implementation will be a requirement for vendors to be compliant with Release 3 of the COUNTER Code of Practice. Serials Solutions has completed this development now to make sure its customers can utilize SUSHI immediately as publishers implement the standard.
Adam Chandler, Coordinator of the Service Design Group at Cornell University and a member of the Project COUNTER Executive Committee is one of the originators of the SUSHI standard. Adam says, “We’re working very diligently with content providers to implement the SUSHI standard. It’s important for vendors to get involved in order to help librarians evaluate their purchase and collection-building decisions. CSV and Excel files only take us so far as containers for transferring usage data. We need to scale up the whole supply chain to support automated transfer of usage data in structured XML.”
The SUSHI protocol support service is a free opt-in upgrade for all 360 Counter subscribers.
About Serials Solutions
Founded by a librarian for librarians in 2000, Serials Solutions is the global leader in e-resource access and management services (ERAMS) that serves more than 2,000 libraries of all sizes and types. Serials Solutions® KnowledgeWorks, the authoritative e-resource knowledgebase, is the foundation for Serials Solutions® 360, the only complete and integrated e-resource access and management solution.
Serials Solutions also is the exclusive source for Ulrichsweb.com™ and Ulrich’s Serials Analysis System™ worldwide, and represents the AquaBrowser Library® discovery layer user interface in the academic market in North America. The WebFeat® federated search service recently acquired by ProQuest soon will be incorporated into the Serials Solutions family of access and discovery services.
Serials Solutions provides fast implementation, easy customization, and outstanding value to libraries throughout the world.
Serials Solutions is a business unit of ProQuest LLC.
About ProQuest
ProQuest provides seamless access to and navigation of more than 125 billion digital pages of the world’s scholarship, delivering it to the desktop and into the workflow of serious researchers in multiple fields, from arts, literature, and social science to science, technology, and medicine. ProQuest is part of the Cambridge Information Group.
ProQuest’s vast content pools are available to researchers through libraries of all types and include the world’s largest digital newspaper archive, periodical databases comprising the output of more than 9,000 titles and spanning more than 500 years, the pre-eminent dissertation collection, and various other scholarly collections. Users access the information through the ProQuest® and CSA Illumina™ online information systems, Chadwyck-Healey™ electronic and microform resources, UMI® microform and print reference products, eLibrary® and SIRS® educational resources, Ulrich’s® Serials Analysis System, COS Scholar Universe, and Serials Solutions® resource management tools. Through the expertise of business units Serials Solutions and COS, ProQuest provides technological tools that allow researchers and libraries to better manage and use their information resources. For more information, visit www.proquest.com, www.proquest.co.uk, and www.csa.com.