Would you like some ANSI Standard sushi?

I can’t let the approval of the National Information Standards Organization’s Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative by the American National Standards Institute pass without playing with the acronyms.

To put it more succinctly, ANSI loves NISO SUSHI.

SUSHI is described as defining “an automated request and response model for the harvesting of electronic resource usage data, utilizing a Web services framework.”

The best news is that this is totally fresh SUSHI. Cornell University’s Adam Chandler said, “We’re very proud of the fact that we were able to move SUSHI from inception to trial use in only 14 months.”

If it took much longer, of course, this SUSHI might start to smell really bad.

The technical details, according to NISO:

In the protocol, a transaction begins when a client service running as part of an application developed by a library—or running as part of a usage data consolidation service or ILS/ERM system—identifies itself, identifies the customer whose statistics are being requested, and specifies the desired report to the SUSHI server service running at a data provider. In response, the server provides the report in XML format, along with the requestor and customer information—or an appropriate error message. The SUSHI developers envision a system in which the client system is programmed to retrieve reports automatically for all the COUNTER-compliant vendors with which the library does business.

COUNTER is an XML schema used by libraries and book publishers. And now you know as much as I do.