[Eril-l] EBSCO Usage Consolidation Pricing change

[VanUllen, Mary K]

We've been using EBSCO's Usage Consolidation for a few years to centralize our usage data.  We've just been told that going forward, they are only going to offer this in combination with their usage loading service.  Their standard cost will include configuring and loading five platforms.  That will bump up our costs for the service by a significant percentage and I see no benefit to us.

I'm baffled (and annoyed) by this as a business decision.  We have about 100 platforms, and the majority of them are configured already.  There is enough complexity to gathering, vetting and uploading the statistics that I am concerned about having them handle the more problematic platforms.  I worry about them capturing all the data for titles that change platforms during the year and about things like JSTOR, where the Current Scholarship titles need to be handled differently than the archival data in order to be meaningful.  My experience with trying to gather stats with SUSHI has not been positive and makes me wonder if we would be missing chunks of data if we weren't monitoring the stats closely ourselves and just trusted EBSCO to handle it.

For those of you who are Usage Consolidation users now, do you already pay for the usage loading service and how well have you found it to work?  Does it really cut down your workload or do you still have to do a lot of troubleshooting?  Do you just pay for five platforms or do you have them handle everything?

Any thoughts or insights would be helpful.

Thanks,
--Mary


Mary K. Van Ullen
Associate Director for Collections
University Library, LI-328
University at Albany
1400 Washington Avenue
Albany, NY  12110
(518) 442-3559


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