Contribute to the DSpace Development Fund
The newly established DSpace Development Fund supports the development of new features prioritized by DSpace Governance. For a list of planned features see the fund wiki page.
Introduction
IRUS (Institutional Repository Usage Statistics) enables Institutional Repositories to share and expose statistics based on the COUNTER standard.
It offers opportunities for benchmarking and acts as an intermediary between repositories and other agencies.
IRUS is currently available in the following areas/countries:
- United Kingdom: https://irus.jisc.ac.uk/
- Australia and New-Zealand: https://irus.jisc.ac.uk/irus-anz/
- United States: https://www.lyrasis.org/programs/Pages/IRUS-US.aspx
Prerequisite
The DSpace server should be able to access the tracker’s base production and test URL's.
The tracker's base production URL will depend on the area/country where your repository is located:
- United Kingdom: http://irus.jisc.ac.uk/counter/
- Australia and New-Zealand: https://irus.jisc.ac.uk/counter/anz/
- United States: https://irus.jisc.ac.uk/counter/us/
The tracker's base test URL is common to all areas/countries:
https://irus.jisc.ac.uk/counter/test/
Access to the tracker's base URLs can easily be verified using a wget command with the applicable URL, e.g.:
wget https://irus.jisc.ac.uk/counter/test/
The above command should return a HTTP 200.
Configuration
The IRUS statistics tracker can be configured in the irus-statistics.cfg file which can be found [dspace-src]/dspace/config/modules.
| Property | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Configuration used to enable the IRUS statistics tracker. Set to true to enable. | false |
irus.statistics.tracker.type-field | Metadata field to check if certain items should be excluded from tracking. If empty or commented out, all items are tracked. | |
irus.statistics.tracker.type-value | The values in the above metadata field that will be considered to be tracked. | |
irus.statistics.tracker.entity-types | The entity types to be included in the tracking. If left empty, only publication hits will be tracked. If entities are disabled in DSpace (the default in DSpace 7.1), then all Items will be included in tracking. | Publication |
irus.statistics.tracker.environment | The tracker environment determines to which url the statistics are exported (test or prod). | test |
irus.statistics.tracker.testurl | The url to which the trackings are exported when testing. (In theory, this should be https://irus.jisc.ac.uk/counter/test/) | |
irus.statistics.tracker.produrl | The url to which the trackings are exported in production. (this will depend on your area/country, refer to the Prerequisite section) | |
irus.statistics.tracker.urlversion | Tracker version | |
irus.statistics.spider.agentregex.url | External URL pointing to the COUNTER user agents file. The user agents file is downloaded from the provided URL as part of the Apache ant build process. Item views determined by DSpace to have been generated by bots/spiders are not sent to IRUS. Including this additional (and optional) agents file can reduce unnecessary network traffic by reducing the need to transfer view data that will be ignored by IRUS. Example value: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/atmire/COUNTER-Robots/master/generated/COUNTER_Robots_list.txt | |
irus.statistics.spider.agentregex.regexfile | Location where the user agents file should be downloaded to. The Apache ant build process that retrieves the user agents file from the URL specified above places it in the location specified here. Example value: ${dspace.dir}/config/spiders/agents/COUNTER_Robots_list.txt |
Re-trying failed attempts
If the IRUS tracker is down or some other kind of error should occur preventing DSpace from committing to the tracker, the record is stored in the database in a separate table (OpenUrlTracker) that is being created automatically during deployment. Committing these entries can be tried again using the following command.
[deployed-dspace]/bin/dspace retry-tracker
This will iterate over all the logged entries and retry committing them. If they fail again, they remain in the table, if they succeed, they are removed.
It is strongly advised to schedule this script to be executed daily or weekly (preferable at low load-times during the night or weekend). If there are no failed entries, the script will not perform any actions and exit immediately.
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