NISO Serves SUSHI

December 12, 2005

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) announced the formation of the Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) to help librarians track usage of online content. NISO will release a draft standard in early 2006 and conduct a spring 2006 workshop to introduce the initiative to a larger community of stakeholders.

Although content providers are now providing usage data routinely, these usage statistics are not available in a standard data container. Libraries and their partner-vendors are finding that the administrative cost of individual provider-by-provider downloads is high.

Project Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources (COUNTER) defined guidelines for counting usage and reporting models, but Initiative Co-chair Adam Chandler of Cornell University said, "Librarians want to make use of their COUNTER reports, but the process of collecting the reports from all the different Web sites is very, very time consuming. The protocol we are developing will allow Electronic Resource Management Systems (ERMS) and other vendors to retrieve and import reports from compliant content providers into local systems automatically. That will free us to spend our energy analyzing the data."

The project website is http://www.library.cornell.edu/cts/elicensestudy/ermi2/sushi/.

Source: National Information Standards Organization (NISO).