[Eril-l] free COUNTER 5.1 harvester "1.0" now available

[Electronic Resources in Libraries discussion list]

Hi, all.
I have completed work on a harvester for COUNTER 5.1 reports and views, and am making it available as open source at:
https://github.com/Melissa-Belvadi-Library-Projects/C5.1_Harvester

It is built entirely in python and only uses 3 third-party python packages.
This version does not have a GUI, so you'd run it on a command line, but it's compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Aside from the python interpreter itself, it does not requiring "installing" anything, just copying the files into a folder,
and everything involved in it stays within that folder/subfolders (eg it doesn't touch the Windows Registry).

My intended audience is librarians/staff who do not have access to a commercial harvester and are currently getting COUNTER reports one interactive vendor dashboard at a time.

It uses the SUSHI API to retrieve the reports in their SUSHI "json" format and does two things with them: it converts the json into tabular tsv files compliant with COUNTER 5.1 rules, and it also saves the data into a local sqlite database. This database is similar to MS Access if you are familiar with that - no server involved, just a file on your hard drive that you can use with any SQL querying program (including MS Access).  This allows you to query your usage across all of your vendors (or at least the COP5.1 compliant ones) and all report types. So for instance, if you want to know how many total ebook uses you had across all vendors/platforms, you can get that in seconds without having to open up all of the tsv reports one at a time.

I have written extensive documentation in the github repository, and attempted to write everything to be intelligible to regular librarians, so you don't have to know anything about python to use it.

I am also starting to build a "library" of sqlite queries that librarians might be interested in so you don't have to figure those out yourself. I'm happy to get requests to add to that. They are in the docs part of the repository.

I will be working this summer with a UPEI CS student to develop a GUI.

If anyone would be interested in a webinar/demo online session, I would be happy to do some - just email me directly.

Or otherwise if you have any questions, feel free to contact me directly.


Melissa Belvadi
Collections Librarian
University of Prince Edward Island
mbelvadi at upei.ca<mailto:mbelvadi at upei.ca>  902-566-0581
ORCID iD: 0000-0002-4433-0189
my public calendar<https://outlook.office365.com/owa/calendar/0fbab27c909e4493be65313bd66d66b6@upei.ca/5fa60af92c6d451c9ddf90c0bb11e00f15552192987609852692/calendar.html>
Make an appointment<https://mbelvadi.youcanbook.me/> via YouCanBookMe
My pronouns are ಅವರು/ಅವರನ್ನು
My emails are sent during the hours that I work and I understand that you will respond during the hours that you work.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.eril-l.org/pipermail/eril-l-eril-l.org/attachments/20250515/bd4800c8/attachment.htm>