NISO Publishes COUNTER-SUSHI Implementation Profile as a Recommended Practice
Provides a Baseline Implementation Structure for SUSHI Harvesting of Release 4 COUNTER Reports
Baltimore, MD - September 17, 2012 -- The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) announces the publication of the COUNTER-SUSHI Implementation Profile (NISO RP-14-2012). The new Recommended Practice provides a practical implementation structure to be used in the creation of reports and services related to harvesting of COUNTER Release 4 reports using the NISO SUSHI Protocol. The Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting (SUSHI) Protocol was issued as a standard (ANSI/NISO Z39.93) in 2007 to simplify and automate the harvesting of COUNTER usage reports by libraries from the growing number of information providers they work with. COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources) is an international initiative that published their first Code of Practice in 2003 and issued Release 4 of the COUNTER Code of Practice for e-Resources in April 2012. XML schemas supporting the Implementation Profile and Release 4 of the Counter Code of Practice have also been published by NISO, which has an agreement with COUNTER to maintain the schemas and keep the SUSHI and COUNTER schemas in synch.
"The creators of the SUSHI standard and the COUNTER XML schema were forward looking and created products that could handle future needs," explains Oliver Pesch, Chief Strategist for E-Resource Access and Management Services at EBSCO Information Services and Co-chair of the NISO SUSHI Standing Committee that developed the Implementation Profile. "Accommodation of such future growth requires a level of abstraction and flexibility to be built in, but that can result in decisions by implementers that could cause interoperability issues or require client implementers to customize the service for every different provider. The COUNTER-SUSHI Implementation Profile was developed to provide guidance with Release 4 of COUNTER by setting out detailed expectations for both the server and the client of how the SUSHI protocol and COUNTER XML reports are to be implemented to ensure interoperability."
"SUSHI implementation became a COUNTER compliance requirement with Release 3 of the COUNTER Code of Practice," states Bob McQuillan, Senior Product Manager at Innovative Interfaces, Inc. and Co-chair of the NISO SUSHI Standing Committee. "The new Release 4 of the COUNTER Code of Practice is a single, integrated Code of Practice covering journals, databases, and books, as well as multimedia content. This COUNTER-SUSHI Implementation Profile supports the changes in Release 4 and was developed with the intention that it could be used by COUNTER auditors to verify compliance of a content provider's SUSHI server."
"Adoption of the SUSHI protocol continues to grow," states Todd Carpenter, NISO Executive Director. "Supporting recommendations such as this Implementation Profile will simplify and expedite the implementation of SUSHI while further ensuring interoperability."
The COUNTER-SUSHI Implementation Profile (NISO RP-14-2012), the referenced schemas, and additional implementation guidance for SUSHI can be found on the SUSHI webpages at: www.niso.org/workrooms/sushi/. Release 4 of the COUNTER Code of Practice is available on the COUNTER website at: www.projectcounter.org/code_practice.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 engages libraries, publishers, information aggregators, and other organizations that support learning, research, and scholarship through the creation, organization, management, and curation of knowledge. NISO works with intersecting communities of interest and across the entire lifecycle of an information standard. NISO is a not-for-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). More information about NISO is available on its website: www.niso.org.