COUNTER statistics

Access to Monthly COUNTER Statistics

Access to Monthly COUNTER Stats

As Coherent does not yet have a library administration portal, we provide COUNTER5 reports through SUSHI using the service provider LibLynx. 


SUSHI (Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative) is an API that allows libraries to automate the retrieval of statistics from each vendor they do business with.  Most large vendors support this.  Many university libraries provide access to thousands of different databases on what may be from a 100 or more providers.  Imagine having to log into 100 different library administration portals and downloading the reports from each vendor - this would take hours. 

SUSHI takes away much of the tedium of getting a monthly or quarterly or annual report from each one of the vendors. One of the design goals of COUNTER is to be able to combine reports from multiple vendors into a single view. SUSHI harvesting tools also help with that process too.

 

There are three steps to providing COUNTER reports via SUSHI for a customer:


  1. Enabling SUSHI credentials

    1. Coherent Digital support does this on the LibLynx dashboard


  1. Sharing those credentials with the customer

    1. This can be done via a Zoho template


  1. Making requests using the SUSHI credentials.

    1. The customer does this with the credentials we provide using a SUSHI harvesting tool.


Enabling SUSHI for a Customer in LibLynx

Go to LibLynx COUNTER Reports and search for your institution. If SUSHI is not enabled, there will be a button for doing this:



Note: If your institution doesn’t show up in the search form for that page, it's probably because there is no usage yet.  If this happens, identify your LibLynx Account number by searching for it in the Accounts section of the dashboard and type in a URL into your browser that looks like this:  https://connect.liblynx.com/counter/account/26861905 where you’d replace this number with in the customer number you want SUSHI credentials for.

Sharing SUSHI Credentials with the Customer

Accessing SUSHI requires a per-customer login to an API.  So the three key pieces of information are the API URL, the Customer ID and and Requestor ID.

 

This is base URL for the SUSHI service

Customer ID This is a LibLynx customer identifier and will look like an 8-digit number (25261702)

Requestor ID.  This is a GUID-looking string and also comes from LibLynx.
Example:  2e849f97-07fa-429a-8d4d-520343e06046 

A fourth URL component called the API KEY is part of the API URL, but the API KEY for LibLynx is the same as the Requestor ID.

As the customer ID and Requestor ID is unique to each customer and comes from LibLynx it can’t be provided through the Zoho Welcome EMAIL, it has to be provided through a support email.  To prepare this email, Pete, Andre or Carolina have to visit the COUNTER section of the LibLynx dashboard.


Go to COUNTER -> SUSHI Credentials. Search for the customer name and open it up.



Copy and paste the customer id (lower right) and Requestor ID top middle, into the support email. Also paste the Requestor ID into the API KEY of the email.


Obtaining COUNTER Reports via SUSHI

The reports we provide are COUNTER5,  Here is what an example URL looks like for a platform report (/reports/pr)

 

https://connect.liblynx.com/sushi/r5/reports/pr?api_key=2e849f97-07fa-429a-8d4d-520343e06046&requestor_id=2e849f97-07fa-429a-8d4d-520343e06046&customer_id=25261702&begin_date=2021-01&end_date=2021-05

 

Additional options for which data columns to include are defined by the SUSHI standard.

 

Here is a list of supported reports:

 

  • Platform Master Report (PR), example.

  • Platform Usage (PR_P1), example.

  • Database Master Report (DB), example. 

  • Database Search and Item Usage (DR_D1), example.

  • Item Report (IR), example.

  • Multimedia Item Report, (IR_M1), example.


LibLynx has a report URL builder located here (password required):

http://guide.liblynx.com/tutorials/sushi/sushi-tutorial.html 


Here you can select the report option and the columns available to make custom requests.


The response to a SUSHI request is a JSON (Javascript Object Notation) response that is defined by the SUSHI standard. (it is not, for example) an Excel or CSV report).

Librarians can be given logins to the LibLynx information for their account, but this is generally unnecessary as we can provide the information to them.



More Information on SUSHI

More info is available from the LibLynx Guide on SUSHI (password required). And from the COUNTER 5 site section on SUSHI.


The COUNTER website provides a SUSHI Harvest tool customers can download. There is a version for consortia to allow them to handle multi-site downloads.




If you don't use SUSHI
Please send a report request to support@coherentdigital.net and our team will provide an updated usage report. This report will not be strictly COUNTER5, but it has columns of data with the COUNTER5 usage in it.



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