Electronic Resource Usage Statistics in Alma

Scope: How e-usage statistics are managed at Duke Libraries, including update schedules and links to reports

Contact: @Sarah Holsapple

Unit: Collection Strategy and Development

Date last reviewed: 12/3/2024

Date of next review:

How e-Usage is managed at Duke University Libraries

At DUL, Collection Strategy and Development (CSD) manages the collection, storage, and dissemination of e-usage statistics, and the Electronic Resource Management Team (ERM) manages vendor communication and administrative accounts for vendors.

Electronic usage data is available in Alma for providers that use the SUSHI API. For electronic providers that don’t offer SUSHI access usage data is collected in folders and stored in the ERSA L drive. Most large providers of e-books and e-journal offer SUSHI access, many providers of video and music streaming don’t.

When vendors are set up in Alma to harvest COUNTER reports via SUSHI, the reports harvested are DR, IR, PR, TR, TR_J1, TR_J2, TR_B1, and TR_B2 as applicable. Not all reports for all dates are available as not all reports have data.

How to Access E-usage at DUL

There are several ways to access e-usage data. If you have a simple question about usage and the provider offers SUSHI access, you can use the dashboards linked below to look up the usage you seek.

If the question is more complicated, the dashboard doesn’t provide the necessary data points, the provider is not available in the dashboard, you need a more complicated date range, or if you need information beyond what is available from Alma (like prices) you will need to submit an AskTech ticket with your question.

E-Usage Dashboards in Alma

E-usage information is available to all Alma users with these easy steps:

1. Click ‘Analytics’ in the left side menu of the Alma homepage.

2. Search for ‘usage’ in the ‘Search Analytics Objects’ search box.

3. The items above the line are usage reports created by DUL people, the reports below the line are out of the box Alma reports.

4. When you click on the report it will open in a new window.

5. You can hover over the report title and click the ‘pin’ icon to pin the report to your Analytics page.

Open

Or you can use these links (you must be signed into Alma)

Duke created Dashboards are:

• E-Book COUNTER Usage (TR_B1, TR_B2)

• Journal COUNTER Usage (TR_J1, JR_J2)

• Platform COUNTER Usage (PR)

• Database COUNTER Usage (DR)

• Item COUNTER Usage (IR) *coming soon

• All Titles  PROMPTED Usage Dashboard

• SUSHI Report Load Details

COUNTER Metric Preferences

For more information about Project COUNTER see this friendly guide to getting started with COUNTER, or this less friendly, but more comprehensive documentation.

In brief, choose one metric (don’t add them together).

Our favorite usage metric is some combination of the words ‘Unique’ meaning one time per user session, and ‘Request’ signifying that the actual item was accessed. When looking at e-books, we look at ‘Title’ over ‘Item’ if available as the at refers to the whole book and not a chapter.

Examples are ‘Unique Title Request’, ‘Unique Item Request’

The other useful metrics are the denials – ‘No License’ and ‘Limit Exceeded’. A ‘No License’ is counted if a user is signed-in to the product (logged in or via SSO or IP authentication), and attempts to access a resource that we don’t have access to. ‘No License’ will capture some of these missed accesses, but not all of them. A ‘Limit Exceeded’ is counted if we have limited access (a certain number of concurrent users, or # of uses) and we have passed that limit.

Usage Statistics Update Schedule

Alma automatically harvests usage data via SUSHI on the 11^th of every month for the previous month usage. For non-SUSHI providers, e-usage is collected quarterly, for July 1 to September 30, October 1 to December 31, Jan 1 to March 31, April 1 to June 30, and stored in the ERSA L drive.

To see what usage reports are available by date and vendor in Alma see the SUSHI Report Load Details dashboard.

The SUSHI Report Load Details Dashboard includes two reports:

• SUSHI Vendors, Reports, and Dates: lists the vendor name, vendor code, SUSHI Account, COUNTER reports available, and the oldest and most recent dates we have that report for. You can use the prompts to filter by Vendor Name, or Vendor Code.

• Report Load Details: Includes the Platform, metric, and SUSHI files for each month of the selected year. A red cell indicates that there is no SUSHI file for that metric. This may be because the report didn’t load properly, or because there is no data for that metric for that month.