[Eril-l] EBSCO Usage Consolidation Pricing change

Thu Apr 30 14:55:30 PDT 2015

We have been using Usage Consolidation for a few years now.  We were not very pleased a few months ago when we learned about the new business model of bundling UC renewal with a mandatory usage loading service for 5 platforms.

We did renew - we have invested a lot into setting the system up and are seeing the benefits of having our usage data consolidated.  But I think we'll be monitoring this development closely.  Here are our biggest issues with the loading service - some of which other posters have mentioned.

1) We have already configured, historically loaded, and performed initial troubleshooting on all of our COUNTER compliant platforms.  All that is left for the loading service to do now is load reports for 5 platforms twice a year.  This really doesn't take very long.  For the minimal amount of time this takes, I suspect we are paying EBSCO at a higher rate than we are paying our staff member who is responsible for the rest of our loading.

2) There is more to our workflow than just loading reports in Usage Consolidation.  For example, we store the original reports on our network, and in some cases we collect more report types than UC can handle.  So, we can't sit back and ignore these platforms even though EBSCO is going to take over part of the work.  How much time is this really saving us?

3) As others have mentioned, loading of some platforms is rather complex.  And while the idea of SUSHI is attractive, for now we have abandoned the practice because it required too much monitoring to see if it was working correctly.   I'm not sure to what extent I trust an outside organization to do things accurately.  And I'm not sure how much "tracking" we'll really be required to do in order to ensure quality control.  For these reasons, we didn't take full advantage of the service.  We gave them EBSCO's own platform, and a couple additional tricky ones, but we did not pass off the ones we have found most troublesome.  We just finished the license negotiation [yes, we needed another one, and at my institution this is no fast task!], so we haven't had our first loads yet.  We'll see how this year goes - if things go well, we might think about passing off more difficult platforms in the future.        

Tricia

Tricia Clayton
Collection Services Librarian
Georgia State University Library
404-413-2867

-----Original Message-----
From: Eril-l [mailto:eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org] On Behalf Of Loder, Julie L
Sent: Thursday, April 30, 2015 1:35 PM
To: 'Annie Erdmann'; VanUllen, Mary K
Cc: eril-l at lists.eril-l.org
Subject: Re: [Eril-l] EBSCO Usage Consolidation Pricing change

We have been using both the loading service and in Usage Consolidation we are setting up some publishers using the SUSHI harvesting tool.  We are pretty happy with it.  And, I am quite happy to let them reload when a publisher announces problems.

My only concern has been addressed below and that is the difference between JSTOR current subscriptions, which should be in the publisher cost per use data and the archive, which should not.  Same with Project single title add-ons.  I was told quite a while back that Ebsco was working with JSTOR specifically on this issue, but I haven’t had any updates in a while.  It seems like more of an issue with the providers and how they supply the data than any usage collection tool.

Julie

From: Eril-l [mailto:eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org] On Behalf Of Annie Erdmann
Sent: Thursday, April 30, 2015 12:13 PM
To: VanUllen, Mary K
Cc: eril-l at lists.eril-l.org
Subject: Re: [Eril-l] EBSCO Usage Consolidation Pricing change

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 <tel:%28518%29%20442-3559> 

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