NISO Publishes Revised SUSHI Standard and Supporting Documentation
New filters and report attributes add to the SUSHI protocol’s flexibility in retrieving e-resource usage data

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has published a revision to the Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) Protocol (ANSI/NISO Z39.93-2014). The SUSHI standard defines an automated request and response model for the harvesting of electronic resource usage data utilizing a Web services framework that can replace the user-mediated collection of usage data reports. It was designed as a generalized protocol extensible to a variety of usage reports. An extension designed specifically to work with COUNTER reports is provided. This new version of the SUSHI standard extends the filter support to allow multiple filters and/or report attributes to be included in the SUSHI Request. Use of these filters and attributes is optional, making the new version backwards compatible with the previous one. Additional documentation supporting SUSHI implementation has been updated including SUSHI schemas, COUNTER schemas, sample reports, selected SUSHI Harvesters tools, and the Server Registry.

“The SUSHI standard was created with the notion of filters; however, the only filter originally provided for was that of the date range for the report,” explains Oliver Pesch, Chief Product Strategist, EBSCO Information Services, and Co-chair of the SUSHI Standing Committee. “With use, a number of cases have surfaced where additional filters and other report attributes would be beneficial. The revised standard allows, for example, filtering by a particular platform for harvesting when a given SUSHI server provides usage for multiple platforms, or specifying that a report exclude items with zero usage to keep the report size smaller.”

“Both the core SUSHI schema and the COUNTER-SUSHI schema have been updated to version 1.7 of SUSHI to match the revised standard,” states Marie Kennedy, Serials & Electronic Resources Librarian, Loyola Marymount University, and Co-chair of the SUSHI Standing Committee. “The SUSHI Standing Committee is also responsible for updating COUNTER-related schemas; the COUNTER-SUSHI schema, the COUNTER schema, and the COUNTER data element values have been updated to support COUNTER Release 4.1. Additionally, the SUSHI website has new sample reports in COUNTER Release 4 formats, updates to some of the SUSHI Harvester tools to allow the user to select “4” as the COUNTER Release, and Server Registry updates to display known COUNTER 4 support.”

“SUSHI has become a widely adopted NISO standard, but continuous maintenance is required to keep it up to date,” said Todd Carpenter, NISO Executive Director. “The SUSHI Standing Committee actively maintains the standard to address any reported implementation issues or new COUNTER Releases, and to consider feature suggestions. This latest revision is an excellent example of how the Standing Committee has updated the standard to provide requested functionality.”

The revised SUSHI standard and extensive supporting tools and documentation are available on the NISO SUSHI website at: www.niso.org/workrooms/sushi/

Cynthia Hodgson

Technical Editor / Consultant

National Information Standards Organization

chodgson@niso.org

301-654-2512