I was interested to see the announcement about Ebsco and web services for bringing together Counter data.
The wide acceptance of the Project COUNTER Code of Practice has assisted greatly in the standardization of how usage data is counted and presented. Libraries are now looking to consolidate this normalized data as input for collection development decisions. A new and sometimes significant challenge is the actual collection of reports for analysis. SUSHI was specifically introduced to solve the problem of harvesting this data. With SUSHI, the library’s usage consolidation application (often tied to a library’s e-resource management software) will be able to use the Web service to automatically retrieve data whenever desired. [Library Technology Guides: Display Article]
In libraries, we have several clear sources of such ‘intentional’ data – data that records choices made by libraries and by users.
We have holdings data (a record of choices made by librarians), ILL data (a record of choices made by users and librarians), we have circulation data (a record of choices made by users), and we have database usage data (a record of choices made by users). Over time, the standardization, consolidation and syndication of this data is potentially valuable in several library service scenarious. For recommendation services, for collection analysis, and so on.
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