[Eril-l] EBSCO Usage Consolidation Pricing change

[Harker, Karen]

Huh…we took the opposite approach.  We selected the more difficult ones, as well as the ebook platforms, which have high rates of unmatched titles.  I will be keeping an eye on their results to see if they do as good or better than we can.

This does seem to be an odd business decision, since the primary reason we selected UC over PQ’s Counter-360 was being able to use the platform without paying for the service.  However, it is frustrating because we load our stats every quarter, which would cost extra for the platforms that they load.

Karen Harker
Collection Assessment Librarian
940-565-2688
Libraries are for Use<http://librariesareforuse.wordpress.com/>

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<mailto:erdmann at simmons.edu>

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