(25 Jun 2020) EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) has developed a new resource to make harvesting COUNTER reports easier. The SUSHI Harvester for Multi-Site Libraries (the R5 Harvester) is a Microsoft Access tool designed to help small to medium size consortia more easily gather COUNTER reports for their affiliated libraries.
The R5 Harvester was created by an EBSCO development team led by the company’s Chief Product Strategist Oliver Pesch who has been involved with COUNTER since its inception. Pesch says the application allows consortia and other multi-library organizations to manage their R5 SUSHI credentials and automate the harvesting of COUNTER statistics. “Usage reports, retrieved via COUNTER_SUSHI, are saved to the local hard drive of the user either in COUNTER R5 tabular form or as a delimited text file suitable for loading into a database.”
Release 5 of the COUNTER Code of Practice has met its goal of reducing complexity while improving the clarity and streamlining of usage reporting. The Director of COUNTER, Lorraine Estelle, says feedback about the new COUNTER R5 release indicated that some library consortia needed to gather usage reports for their affiliated libraries, and EBSCO was able to provide the R5 Harvester. “Library staff told us that they needed a tool to harvest usage reports more efficiently and EBSCO was able to create the R5 Harvester, an easy to use solution allowing multi-library organizations to gather usage reports for affiliated libraries.”
The R5 Harvester, which is free for non-commercial use, and the supporting manual are available at the COUNTER website: https://www.projectcounter.org/r5_harvester/.
The press release is here.
