EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) has developed a new resource to make harvesting COUNTER reports easier. The SUSHI Harvester for Multi-Site Libraries (the R5 Harvester) is a Microsoft Access tool designed to help small to medium size consortia more easily gather COUNTER reports for their affiliated libraries.

The R5 Harvester was created by an EBSCO development team led by the company's Chief Product Strategist Oliver Pesch who has been involved with COUNTER since its inception. Pesch says the application allows consortia and other multi-library organizations to manage their R5 SUSHI credentials and automate the harvesting of COUNTER statistics. "Usage reports, retrieved via COUNTER_SUSHI, are saved to the local hard drive of the user either in COUNTER R5 tabular form or as a delimited text file suitable for loading into a database."

Release 5 of the COUNTER Code of Practice has met its goal of reducing complexity while improving the clarity and streamlining of usage reporting. The Director of COUNTER, Lorraine Estelle, says feedback about the new COUNTER R5 release indicated that some library consortia needed to gather usage reports for their affiliated libraries, and EBSCO was able to provide the R5 Harvester. "Library staff told us that they needed a tool to harvest usage reports more efficiently and EBSCO was able to create the R5 Harvester, an easy to use solution allowing multi-library organizations to gather usage reports for affiliated libraries."

The R5 Harvester, which is free for non-commercial use, and the supporting manual are available at the COUNTER website: https://www.projectcounter.org/r5_harvester/.

About EBSCO Information Services

EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) is the leading discovery service provider for libraries worldwide with more than 11,000 discovery customers in over 100 countries. EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) provides each institution with a comprehensive, single search box for its entire collection, offering unparalleled relevance ranking quality and extensive customization. EBSCO is also the preeminent provider of online research content for libraries, including hundreds of research databases, historical archives, and clinical decisions tools serving millions of end users at tens of thousands of institutions. EBSCO is the leading provider of electronic journals & books for libraries, with subscription management for more than 360,000 serials, including more than 57,000 e-journals, as well as online access to more than 1,500,000 e-books. For more information, visit the EBSCO website at: www.ebsco.com. EBSCO Information Services is a division of EBSCO Industries, Inc., a family owned company since 1944.