Bethesda, MD (USA) - May 15, 2006 - The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and Project Counter have agreed to collaborate to promote harvesting of Counter statistics via the web service protocol developed by NISO's SUSHI program. SUSHI is the acronym for Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative.
Project COUNTER has defined useful and widely adopted protocols for recording and reporting online usage of different categories of content. SUSHI is tackling the problem that librarians encounter in making use of their COUNTER reports. "The process of collecting the reports from all the different Web sites is very, very time consuming," explained Adam Chandler of Cornell University. "The protocol SUSHI is developing will allow 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." Chandler and Oliver Pesch, EBSCO Information Services, serve as SUSHI Co-chairs.
As part of the agreement with COUNTER, NISO's SUSHI program will assume responsibility for the maintenance of the XML Schema that expresses the currently implemented version of the COUNTER Code of Practice. NISO will host the COUNTER XML schema on the NISO website.
Peter Shepherd of COUNTER added, "SUSHI represents a major step forward in making it easier for librarians to assimilate, manage and analyze the COUNTER usage data from vendors. We are delighted to co-operate with NISO on this very important initiative."
The project website is http://www.niso.org/committees/SUSHI/SUSHI_story.html.
About the National Information Standards Organization (NISO)
NISO fosters the development and maintenance of standards that facilitate the creation, persistent management, and effective interchange of information so that it can be trusted for use in research and learning. To fulfill this mission, NISO works with intersecting communities of interest and across the entire life cycle of an information standard. NISO (www.niso.org) is a not-for-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).
About COUNTER
COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of NeTworked Electronic Resources) is a multi-agency initiative whose objective is to develop a set of internationally accepted, extendible Codes of Practice that will allow the usage of online information products and services to be measured more consistently. Release 2 of the COUNTER Code of Practice for journals and databases was published in April 2005 and is now widely implemented. COUNTER is actively supported by the international community of librarians and publishers, and by their professional organizations.