Although recording of usage data is common in scholarly information
services, its exploitation for the creation of value-added services
remains limited due to concerns regarding, among others, user privacy,
data validity, and the lack of accepted standards for the representation,
sharing and aggregation of usage data. A technical, standards-based
architecture for sharing usage information is presented. In this
architecture, OpenURL-compliant linking servers aggregate usage
information of a specific user community as it navigates the distributed
information environment that it has access to. This usage information is
made OAI-PMH harvestable so that usage information exposed by many
linking servers can be aggregated to facilitate the creation of
value-added services with a reach beyond that of a single community or a
single information service.