December 11, 2007 -- Emeryville, CA. Innovative Interfaces announced today that members of the prestigious Association of Research Libraries (ARL) have achieved real-time acquisition of user statistics from within Innovative's ERM. Using the Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) model, staff can now access the high-volume of information from hundreds of e-resources—enabling cost-per-use analysis and eliminating time-consuming staff chores. This SUSHI advance extends Innovative's leadership in supporting the ARL members. The first to implement SUSHI with the Innovative ERM are Cornell University (NY), Dartmouth College (NH), University of Arizona, Washington State University, Wayne State (MI), and University of Washington. To date one-in-four ARL institutions are using the Innovative ERM.
Dartmouth College
"The automation of routine staff tasks is an essential component of re-tooling the library organization to enable creation of new services," says Dartmouth College Library's Head of Cataloging & Metadata Cecilia Tittemore. "Using the SUSHI harvesting protocol to automate collection of usage statistics does just that. It transforms a time-intensive staff process to find and fetch usage data into a simple and predictable machine-to-machine conversation. Innovative's initiative in fostering the development and adoption of this protocol is a model for future library-vendor collaboration in standards design."
"We are grateful to Innovative's staff for their timely help as we installed ERM and SUSHI," adds David Seaman, Dartmouth's Associate Director for Information Management, "and in particular to Ted Fons for his expertise as part of the Digital Library Federation's Electronic Resource Management Initiative and NISO's SUSHI Working Group. We are now enjoying the benefits of this very successful collaborative work."
Cornell University
Managing electronic resources effectively, including usage data, is difficult, requiring appropriate tools, work flows, and standards," Says Adam Chandler of Cornell University. "One new piece of the puzzle, the NISO SUSHI protocol, automates the process of downloading COUNTER usage reports and is already built into the Innovative ERM. Thanks to a significant degree to the commitment to SUSHI demonstrated by Innovative, the SUSHI protocol is on its way to widespread adoption, benefiting libraries and library vendors everywhere."
"ARL libraries have a huge financial investment in quality e-journals, and they are crucial to their research-support mission," says Ted Fons. "Features like the quick statistical information SUSHI provides help them make financial decisions easier and provides the greatest service level possible to their campuses."
The 2007 Release of Electronic Resource Management leverages information harvested by SUSHI, to facilitate cost-per-use analysis and graphs of usage statistics to determine which journals in a particular package are most useful.
Washington State University
Washington State University is currently importing SUSHI-formatted usage data provided by Scholarly Stats from 35 different suppliers such as ProQuest and IEEE into Innovative's Electronic Resource Management. This represents data for about 35,000 titles with some duplication where a title is supplied by more than one vendor. "The ability to schedule imports once and then view data when we want is a great time saver," says Janet Chisman. "We have been able to assign new duties to the person who did these downloads manually, improving our workflow and efficiency!"
"Innovative is pleased to provide the technology these institutions need to work smarter and more efficiently," Says Senior Product Manager Ted Fons. "Innovative remains committed to this partnership as the technology evolves."
About Cornell University Library
Composed of 20 libraries, the Cornell University (NY) Library is one of the largest academic research libraries in the U.S. The library's services are designed to provide easy access to our outstanding collections.
About Dartmouth College Library
Dartmouth College (NH) Library fosters intellectual growth and advances the mission of Dartmouth College and affiliated communities by supporting excellence and innovation in education and research, managing and delivering information, and partnering to develop and disseminate new scholarship.
About Washington State University Libraries
The Washington State University Libraries have holdings of approximately 67,000 e-resource titles. There are six libraries on the Pullman campus, including agriculture, architecture, education, health sciences, humanities and social sciences, and science and engineering. In addition Washington State has regional campus libraries in the Richland-Pasco-Kennewick area, Spokane and Vancouver and supports access to electronic resources in extension offices throughout the state.
About Innovative Interfaces
For over 25 years, Innovative Interfaces has dedicated its energies to meeting the needs of libraries and the challenges of library automation. The company has fulfilled this mission with first-rate services and products such as the Millennium integrated library platform, the INN-Reach direct consortia borrowing solution, Electronic Resource Management, and the Encore discovery services platform. Today, thousands of libraries of all types in over 40 countries rely on Innovative's products, services, and support. The company is located in Emeryville, California with offices around the world.
