Do you want to demonstrate the global impact of the content you are collecting?
Do you want to know who is visiting your repository, where they come from and how they find you?
Statistics can help!
Collecting and analysing usage statistics can greatly help institutions demonstrate the world-wide impact of their repository and can help justify the input of effort required to gather that ever elusive content! Nicky Cashman, Repository Advisor at Aberystwyth University, has recently used the reporting tools in Google Analytics to create a usage report for AU's institutional repository Cadair.
Screen shot of Cadair statistical report
The report contains a selection of the 'big picture' repository statistics alongside name checks for the top downloads and contributors, and a selection of postive feedback and comments from repository users. The format is brief but it gets across the key messages in an eye catching way, especially with the use of colourful graphs and charts. Nicky will be producing these reports on a regular basis and is planning to use them in various forums where the repository is under discussion, including meetings with senior managers and decision makers. A copy of Nicky's full statistical report is available in the WRN document store on our web site. If any partners want more information about using and exploiting statistics, or want assistance getting Google Analytics up and running on their repository, please just email WRN the team.
Finally, it seems appropriate to add to this post the results of the recent WRN statistical census that we undertook. Between July and October 2009 we have seen just over a 12% growth in the number of items contained within the Welsh repositories. A table showing individual growth rates across this first reporting period appears below.
Fingers crossed we can build on these figures over the coming months.
Posts
E-mail from Jenny Delasalle, Chair of the UK Council of Research Repositories (UKCoRR)/ E-Repositories Manager, University of Warwick follows on nicely from this post:
ReplyDeleteAndy McGregor of JISC has drawn our attention to a blog posting which he thinks we might find of value...
Tony Hirst of the open university has written an interesting blog post on how he uses google analytics to find out which university visitors to his website have come from:
http://writetoreply.org/actually/2009/10/28/thinking-about-user-tracking-on-writetoreply/
I see Trinity have achieved 22.64% growth based on 0 deposits.
ReplyDeleteThanks for finding our deliberate mistake Les! Trinity have actually added 12 more items since July (53 to 65) rather than nothing so that's where 22.64% comes from. Not fiddling the books, I promise!
ReplyDelete