Serials Solutions, a business unit of ProQuest, US, has successfully tested and deployed the Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI), 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 analyse a title's usage and its cost per-use.
The SUSHI protocol was developed to allow librarians to evade the process of downloading, aggregating, and formatting COUNTER-compliant usage reports from vendor websites. 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 labour.
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 utilise SUSHI immediately as publishers implement the standard. The SUSHI protocol support service is a free opt-in upgrade for all 360 Counter subscribers.
