“Pillars in the Mist: Supporting Effective Decision-making with Statistical Analysis of SUSHI and COUNTER Usage Reports
Aleksandra Petrovic, University of Auckland

Increasing call for evidence-based decision making in combination with rising importance of e-resources (from 60% -> 87% of collection in last ten years), in context of decreasing budget and changes in user behaviour.

Options: EBSCO usage consolidations, Alma analytics or Journal Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP). Pros of Alma: no additional fees; part of existing system; no restrictions for historical records; could modify/enhance reports; could have input in future development. But does involve more work than other systems.

Workflow: harvest data by manual methods; automatic receipt of reports, mostly COUNTER; receipt by email. All go into Alma Analytics, then create reports, analyse, make subscription decisions.

Use the Pareto Principle eg 20% of vendors responsible for 80% of usage. Similarly 80% of project time spent in data gathering creates 20% of business value; 20% of time spent in analysis for 80% of value.

Some vendors slow to respond (asking at renewal time increased their motivation….) Harvesting bugs eg issue with JR1. There were reporting failures (especially in move from http to https) and issues tracking the harvesting. Important to monitor what data is being harvested before basing decisions on it! Alma provides a “Missing data” view but can’t export into Excel to filter so created a similar report on Alma Analytics (which they’re willing to share).

So far have 106 SUSHI, 45 manual COUNTER vendors and 17 non-COUNTER vendors. Got stats from 85% of vendors.

Can see trends in open access usage. Can compare whether users are using recent vs older material – drives decisions around backfiles vs rolling embargos. Can look at usage for titles in package – eg one where only three titles had high usage so just bought those and cancelled package.

All reports in one place. Can be imported into Tableau for display/visualisation: a nice cherry on the top.

Cancelling low-use items / reducing duplication has saved money. Hope more vendors will use SUSHI to increase data available. If doing it again would:

• use a generic contact email for gathering data
• use the dashboard earlier in the project

Cost per use trickier to get out – especially with exchange rate issues but also sounds like reports don’t quite match up in Alma.

Alma plus JUSP
Julie Wright, University of Adelaide

Moved from using Alma Analytics to JUSP – to both. Timeline:

• Manual analysis of COUNTER: very time intensive: 2-3 weeks each time and wanted to do it monthly…
• UStat better but only SUSHI, specific reports, and no integration with Alma Analytics
• Alma Analytics better still but still needs monitoring (see above-mentioned https issues)
• JUSP – only COUNTER/SUSHI, reports easy and good, but can’t make your own

JUSP also has its own SUSHI server – so can harvest from here into Alma. This causes issues with duplicate data when the publishers don’t match exactly. Eg JUSP shows “BioOne” when there are actually various publishers; or “Wiley” when Alma has “John Wiley and Sons”. Might need to delete all Alma data and use only JUSP data.