A Side of SUSHI

ITI Bloggers November 30th, 2005

Just when we thought we had enough acronyms to contend with, enter SUSHI (Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative). And this doesn’t have anything to do with a California roll.

EBSCO Information Services, with members of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), has developed a Web service that allows easy machine-to-machine transfer of journal-level usage. According to Oliver Pesch, EBSCO’s chief strategist of E-Resources, SUSHI will be released as a draft standard for trial use in early 2006 to help libraries harvest and analyze data from Project COUNTER Code of Practice (Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources). In a nutshell, libraries were looking for a way to consolidate normalized data for use in collection development decisions. The new Web service can be used with the library’s usage consolidation application to retrieve essential data automatically when needed.

Barbara Brynko
Editor in Chief
Information Today