Introducing the COUNTER 5 Report Tool

UPEI CompSci students working with Melissa Belvadi have created a COUNTER 5 SUSHI harvester, report manager and analysis tool.

The team designed the tool for individual libraries rather than consortia. It works entirely on a local desktop and no local server needed. You can get the tool from:https://github.com/CS-4820-Library-Project/COUNTER-5-Report-Tool

The Council of Atlantic University Libraries / Conseil des bibliothèques universitaires de l’Atlantique facilitated a webinar in which Melissa gave a live demo of the tool. You can view the recording at https://caul-cbua.ca/sites/default/files/CWAC_2018-04-12.mp4

Anyone interested in contributing to the code/vendor list should contact Melissa Belvadi, mbelvadi@upei.ca.  See github wiki for the list of students who developed it.

Update on 3 June 2020

Since presenting this webinar Melissa has added new functionality to the COUNTER 5 Report Tool so that it now handles cost data that is on a non-calendar-year cycle, and also handles that in the visual cost-ratio charts.

Allowing cost data to be provided by any range of month/years required reworking some of the underlying database tables, so there’s some conversion/rebuilding that needs to be done if you’ve already started to use it.

The easiest thing to do if you haven’t spent a lot of time manually importing non-SUSHI R4 and R5 data,  is to export your vendors’ data and cost data, and then install the new version in a totally different directory and start over, importing your vendors from that export, and re-fetching all the SUSHI reports.

Then if you had used the Cost function, you’ll need to edit the exported costs tsvs to include the new date columns (instead of just year, there’s start-month, start-year, end-month, end-year).

Melissa has described that process as well as what to do if you want to overlay what you’ve already done with the new version, at the bottom of the Costs wiki page.

You can download the new executable here:

https://github.com/CS-4820-Library-Project/COUNTER-5-Report-Tool/releases

You can read the explanation about upgrading the cost tables at the bottom of this page:

https://github.com/CS-4820-Library-Project/COUNTER-5-Report-Tool/wiki/Costs

If you don’t plan to ever use the Cost functionality, you can just overlay the old executable with the new one without doing any database rebuilding or other updates. We made some very minor interface improvements outside of Cost/Visual, but nothing that affected the stored usage data format.