The NISO SUSHI Standing Advisory Committee has announced the approval
and final release of the schemas (and related files) providing full
support of Release 3 of the COUNTER Code of Practice for Journals and
Databases. Notable in this latest release of the COUNTER Code of
Practice is the requirement that content providers implement SUSHI as a
means of delivering their reports. With the schemas now finalized,
content providers can be confident about setting their development
agendas for implementing SUSHI.

The SUSHI (Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative) standard
(ANSI/NISO Z39.93 - 2007) defines an automated request and response
model for the harvesting of electronic resource usage data, utilizing a
Web services framework. Designed as a generalized protocol extensible to
a variety of usage reports, it also contains an extension designed
specifically to work with COUNTER usage reports. COUNTER reports have
become a mainstay of collection analysis for many libraries; SUSHI
serves to automate the time consuming and error prone process of
manually running, retrieving and loading these reports.

NISO's SUSHI Standard Advisory Committee, formed last summer to maintain
the standard, has used community feedback to identify additional needs
for implementation and to examine the standard for areas that may need
updating or improving. In addition to addressing the needs of the
schemas, the Committee's charge also includes the goal of making SUSHI
easier for implementers to understand and work with. As part of that
effort, the schemas have been annotated with descriptions and examples
for key elements, and the website (www.niso.org/workrooms/sushi
<http://www.niso.org/workrooms/sushi>) now includes clear graphical
representations of the schemas. In addition, the FAQs on the site are
being updated and include sections specifically for librarians and for
developers. Further documentation on the site includes material covered
in NISO's SUSHI webinar on October 2, a list of clients (ERM and Usage
Consolidation services) supporting SUSHI, and a list of SUSHI compliant
content providers, and other supporting information.

Also on the site is a link to the draft, "How to Start Building a SUSHI
Service." This work in progress by Thomas Barker, Software Engineer, IT
and Digital Development at the University of Pennsylvania Library, is a
valuable tool for those interested in getting started with building a
client.

/Background  and Technical Details/
Launched in 2002, COUNTER is designed to help librarians and publishers
in the recording and exchange of usage statistics for electronic
resources. By following COUNTER's Code of Practice, vendors can provide
libraries with data using standardized formats and data elements. The
SUSHI protocol is a SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)
request/response Web services "wrapper" for the XML version of COUNTER
reports.

In the protocol, a transaction begins when a client service running as
part of an application developed by a library or running as part of a
usage data consolidation service or ILS/ERM identifies itself,
identifies the customer whose statistics are being requested, and
specifies the desired report to the SUSHI server service running at a
data provider. In response, the server provides the report in XML
format, along with the requestor and customer information or an
appropriate error message. The SUSHI developers envision a system in
which the client system is programmed to retrieve reports automatically
for all the COUNTER-compliant vendors with which the library does business.

Note: This message has been cross-posted.

Cynthia Hodgson
NISO Technical Editor Consultant
National Information Standards Organization
Email: chodgson@niso.org <mailto:chodgson@niso.org>
Phone: 301-654-2512