In 2002, in response to the messy situation usage statistics had created, there arose an international, nonprofit organization dedicated to facilitating “consistent, credible, and comparable” usage data:¹ Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources, or Project COUNTER (figure 4). COUNTER released the first code of practice in 2003. It counts among its members many major consortia, libraries, and most major publishers and content providers. This first code of practice focused on journals and databases and included definitions for variables such as full-text article, turnaways, searches, and sessions. It also specified the acceptable formats and delivery methods for usage statistics. The code blazed the trail for the inclusion of language to insist on COUNTER-compliant data in electronic resource licenses and codified what it meant to be “COUNTER-compliant.”

By no means has COUNTER rested on its laurels since the first code of practice, however. Release 2 of the COUNTER code of Practice for Journals and Databases was published April 2005. These first two releases have been superseded by the Release 3 of the COUNTER Code of Practice for Journals and Databases published in August 2008. COUNTER is not exclusive to journals and databases. The board of directors, executive committee, project director, and international advisory board continually explore ways to facilitate the collection of “consistent, credible, and comparable” usage statistics. Moving beyond journal and database content, COUNTER responded with the Release 1 of the COUNTER Code of Practice for Books and Reference Works, published in March 2006. As of 2007, a vendor must pass a COUNTER audit in order to claim COUNTER compliancy, and in January 2008, COUNTER also released reports for library consortia. The COUNTER website has the complete codes of practice as well as detailed information about what a vendor must do to pass a COUNTER audit. Finally, COUNTER was involved in a joint study with the United Kingdom Serials Group (UKSG) about how usage statistics could contribute to the constitution of a new way of measuring journal quality, the Journal Usage Factor. The final report was released in 2007.²

Just as COUNTER moved beyond the database and journal levels to books, it is now involved in initiatives such as PIRUS 2 (figure 5) that seek to facilitate the sharing and collection of usage statistics at a more granular level. As the press release announcing the project explains, “PIRUS 2 builds on the standards already established by COUNTER and on the results of the original PIRUS (Publisher and Institutional Repository Usage Statistics) project, which demonstrated that it is technically feasible to create record and consolidate usage statistics for individual articles using data from repositories and publishers, despite the diversity of organizational and technical environments in which they operate.”³ PIRUS 1 and 2 are sponsored by the United Kingdom Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). PIRUS 2 has as its objectives to “develop a set of standards, protocols and processes to enable publishers, repositories and other organizations to generate and share authoritative, trustworthy usage statistics for the individual articles and other items that they host.”⁴ The digitization of scholarship has fundamentally changed the way in which scholars interact with the research they produce and read—the designation of a “journal” or a “book” may eventually be less meaningful than the article or the chapter. Thus, as increased interest is focused on smaller portions of more traditional containers, it behooves the library and publisher community to develop consistent ways to capture and share usage statistics at more and more granular levels.

As Peter Shepherd, project director of Project COUNTER, detailed in a presentation given at the International Coalition of Library Consortia 2009 fall meeting, PIRUS 1 was led by COUNTER and was completed in January 2009. PIRUS 2 is slated to run from October 2009 to December 2010 and is led by Mimas and Cranfield University with project team members also including COUNTER, CrossRef, and Oxford University Press.⁵ CrossRef is an important member of the team as it represents a large portion of the publisher community. It is the largest registration agency for Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) and continues to be a leader in the maintenance and development of technology that allows interlinking of all types of scholarship via the DOI and OpenURL.

Shepherd also explained in his presentation two reasons why the collection and sharing of article-level usage data is now more practical. First, “Implementation by COUNTER of XML-based usage reports makes more granular reporting of usage a practical proposition.” And second, “Implementation by COUNTER of the SUSHI protocol facilitates the automated consolidation of usage data from different sources.”⁶ SUSHI will be explained further in the next section. Also of note is the use of the OpenURL in the original PIRUS 1 report; the OpenURL is an elegant framework that is extensible enough to be used in a variety of ways, not just an answer to the appropriate copy problem. For more information about the OpenURL, visit the National Information Standards Organization standard, ANSI/NISO Z39.88 (see gray box). Overall, PIRUS 2 promises to deliver an exciting new chapter in usage statistic technology. Both PIRUS and the Journal Usage Factor represent an evolution from the purely local or consortial use of usage statistics to more global applications. Products described later, such as the Ex Libris bX Recommender Service, also represent this evolution of the global application of usage data for broader uses.

PIRUS 1 final report

www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/pals3/pirus_finalreport.pdf

PIRUS 2

www.cranfieldlibrary.cranfield.ac.uk/pirus2/tiki-index.php

ANSI/NISO Z39.88: The OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services

www.niso.org/kst/reports/standards?step=2&project_key=d5320409c5160be4697dc046613f71b9a773cd9e

The Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) was created in response to the amount of time and effort librarians were expending in collecting usage statistics from literally hundreds of vendors (figure 6). As Oliver Pesch outlined in a presentation to the NFAIS Forum in 2006, SUSHI's objectives are:

• “Solve the problem of harvesting and managing usage data from a growing number of providers”
• “Promote consistency in usage formatting (XML)”
• “Automate the process”⁷

As of 2010, the initiative has proved at least partially successful, and it is now an ANSI/NISO standard, Z39.93.⁸ In another example of collaboration among various members from across the information and publishing community, libraries, subscription agents, content providers, and integrated library system vendors came together to create a simple yet extensible standard that has the potential to drastically reduce the amount of manual effort required to collect usage statistics from various sources.

Pesch goes on to explain in his 2006 presentation that SUSHI is a “web-services model for requesting data” and is not “a model for counting usage statistics.”⁹ It is also important to note that SUSHI is not a usage consolidation application. At the 2009 American Library Association Midwinter Meeting, Chan Li explained in a presentation: “SUSHI is not a stand-alone application, it works with another system to retrieve COUNTER usage reports.” Li went on to explain that there is a SUSHI client on the library's server that usually integrates with an ERM (electronic resource management) system and there is a SUSHI server on content provider's system. Additionally, Li notes that “COUNTER reports need to be loaded into another system for processing and reporting. For SUSHI to be effective, a Usage Management system must be in place.”¹⁰ At this point, there are a number of libraries, publishers, and ERM systems and ILS vendors using SUSHI, but the numbers of supporting librarians, publishers, and content providers has not grown as quickly as the industry would like. In essence, the reason that the SUSHI initiative has enjoyed only partial success is “owing to a lack of critical mass of SUSHI-compliant vendors.”¹¹ Several of the librarians who responded to the survey described in chapter 4 and who were interviewed mentioned that they would like to explore and implement SUSHI, but they do not currently have the time. As any practicing librarian involved with electronic resources can attest, the daily management and acquisition of e-resources could easily fill 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. However, for librarians who are charged with the tedious task of collecting usage statistics, SUSHI has great potential. As the Frequently Asked Questions webpage about SUSHI on the NISO website states: “The SUSHI protocol automates the process; but also, by default, encourages the publishers to put usage data into a standard format (COUNTER XML). Therefore the retrieval is not only automatic but far easier to use.”¹² Moreover, Release 3 of the COUNTER Codes of Practice requires support of SUSHI in order for a vendor to claim COUNTER-compliancy. Perhaps such a requirement will be further incentive to reach a critical mass of SUSHI-compliant vendors.

In an interview in May 2010, Oliver Pesch, chief strategist, E-Resource Access & Management Services, EBSCO Information Services, noted that one of the current issues facing SUSHI was the slow implementation by content providers.¹³ However, the involvement of the Scholarly IQ company (discussed in more detail in the next chapter) has added momentum. For those who would like to explore SUSHI further, the SUSHI webpages on the NISO website are a veritable treasure trove of FAQs, getting started guides, and implementation examples.

SUSHI

www.niso.org/workrooms/sushi

A number of commercial products and services have emerged in the wake of standards such as COUNTER and SUSHI. These products and services may be integrated with a library's current ERM system or ILS, or may be standalone services that are interoperable with an ERM or ILS from another vendor. The following section briefly outlines a sampling of the products currently available on the market; this is not an exhaustive list or an evaluation of the efficacy of any of these products or services. For further information about each, it is wise to visit with the vendors and then interview other librarians currently using the product or service in order to determine if it does what is promised.