[Eril-l] EBSCO Usage Consolidation Pricing change

[Annie Erdmann]

Hi Mary,

We use the Usage Consolidation Service here at Simmons College.  I love the
product and the data we can get out of it, but I also think that the 5
platform loading service is gratuitous.  I am not sure why that is a
required part of the business model for this product.  I felt odd about
having them load usage from their direct competitors.  So, I selected Ebsco
as one of my platforms and then just picked 4 other publishers.  Honestly,
it was more inconvenient than a service to me.

The only other concern for me is that the product does not seem to do a
good job of picking up on publisher platform statistics when the primary
platform is JSTOR, Project Muse, etc.  I had to adjust those stats in my
reports manually.  I did open a ticket or two at first to report that the
primary publishers platform was wrong, but Ebsco wasn't treating it as a
global problem, so I gave up on making 15 or so support tickets.

I have found that if you have a problem loading the stats yourself, then
Ebsco will have problems also.  I picked easy reports for them to load that
I knew would work.

annie

*---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------*

*Annie Erdmann*
Digital Assets/ eResources Librarian
Simmons College Library
Boston MA 02115
617-521-2723
erdmann at simmons.edu

On Thu, Apr 30, 2015 at 11:48 AM, VanUllen, Mary K <mvanullen at albany.edu>
wrote:

>  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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