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This blog post from the CELUS team helps to outline common errors in Exception codes when harvesting ’empty’ COUNTER reports using the COUNTER API (sushi) protocol. COUNTER’s Exception codes were designed to allow report producers (publishers) to consistently report real or potential issues with report harvests to report consumers (libraries). When Exceptions are used incorrectly, it creates confusion and undermines the error reporting process.
The COUNTER API was designed for machines to use periodically and on a massive scale. Let’s consider a typical consortium with 50 members subscribing to 50 platforms, with a conservative two COUNTER reports per platform. This consortium would be harvesting 5000 individual reports each month. It is impractical if not impossible to manually inspect each harvested report when operating on this scale. It is therefore vital to report potential issues correctly and consistently, so that the harvesting tool (client) can handle the errors correctly and without human intervention.
In this post we describe the common Exception errors we have observed with empty reports (those with no usage data), and the problems they cause on the client side. We focus on machine harvesting in this post, but human users face the same problems.
