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changes.mady.by.user Mark Diggory

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changes.mady.by.user Tim Donohue

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"Page Views" versus Downloads

  • In my opinion (Tim Donohue) , there's really two main types of practical statistics that may be of interest to different individuals using a repository
    • Page Views (i.e. individual visits to individual splash pages within a repository) - From experiences at U of Illinois, most of our individual faculty members or departments don't really care about how many people out on the web visit their item "splash page". These "Page Views" however are still usually of interest to the Repository Administrators, as it can sometimes help them determine how users are using the site and what they are visiting, etc. Reports about Page Views could be generated by something like Google Analytics (or AWStats), as that is what both do quite well – Tim Donohue 10:00, 29 May 2009 (CDT)
    • Downloads (i.e. download counts of individual files in the repository) - From experiences at U of Illinois, this is what our faculty/staff/departments really want to see from a repository. They are very interested in reports of actual downloads over time, including "Top 10" lists of downloads at Community/Collection levels over different time frames (e.g. "Top 10 Downloads in ___ Community in last month/year/overall"). These download reports would be much more difficult to generate using something like Google Analytics, as Google Analytics has no concept of the hierarchical structure of a given repository (i.e. Community / Collection / Item / Bitstream) – Tim Donohue 10:00, 29 May 2009 (CDT)
  • I agree with Tim, and would only add this: We have had numerous requests to collect and present information about referring site – in other words, whether the link to the DSpace item or bitstream is coming from Google, Google Scholar, Yahoo, or wherever, so we've begun to capture that information. Jim Ottaviani 13:00, 29 May 2009 (EDT)
    • Just to back up what Jim has said, U of Illinois has also had numerous requests for information about where downloads are coming from. This includes wanting to know if they are coming from Google, a direct blog link, etc (like Jim mentioned), but also where they may be coming from in the world (on-campus, from the USA, from elsewhere in the world, etc.). Again, the requests we've heard all have to do with generating these reports based on downloads and not based on "page views" --– Tim Donohue 12:30, 29 May 2009 (CDT)
  • Yes, agreed. Its always the downloads that people after, but once you have an implementation to support downloads, adding hooks for page views is trivial and the door is open to many other reports as well. --Mark Diggory 14:12, 9 June 2009 (EDT)

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