Re: E-J statistics (Minh-Thu Nguyen) Marcia Tuttle 13 Apr 2001 19:54 UTC
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 14:52:35 -0400 From: Minh-Thu NGUYEN <mtnguyen@COURRIEL.POLYMTL.CA> Subject: Re: E-J statistics At Ecole Polytechnique, Montreal, we have been taking "usage" statistics of electronic resources for about a year. In order to do this, our URLs have 2 parts: - part 1 is the address of a local perl script which increments the count, then redirects to the address in the second part. - part 2 is the address of the resource. Example: http://www.biblio.polymtl.ca/cgi-bin/go/ojps.aip.org:80/ASMEJournals/Dynamic Sys/ <-------------- part 1 --------><--------------- part 2 ---------------> Every resource's address has this structure, however, we keep statistics by group. This means that if someone clicks anyone of the thirty or so journals of the ASME, the group ASME will be incremented, but we won't know which of the journals has been accessed. Which is kind of OK since most electronic resources are licensed by group, and since we cannot afford to consider doing this on an individual basis anyway . Advantages : - have SOME statistics, PLUS a uniform way of counting and presenting statistics for all resources. - have complete stats of computers in the home domain Disadvantages : - need to insert the script's address in each resources to count. - link checking programs do not check redirected addresses (only report the redirection), so we have to produce a list of such addresses, take out the srcipt's address then run the checker program. - users probably bookmark their favorite journals which may or may not contain our script. - every click is counted, not the sessions (the sessions are on the publishers' servers) - need to manipulate the stats to address the following problems: . robots and people from outside (they might or might not be able to access after all but the clicks are counted) . people using Internet services and our proxy server. I would have to say that all this is quite time consuming ! We try to limit this control to paid resources, and as mentioned, as groups. Hope this helps. Minh-Thu Nguyen Ecole Polytechnique, Montreal mtnguyen@mail.polymtl.ca ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 13:28:13 -0400 From: David Goodman <dgoodman@Princeton.EDU> Subject: E-J statistics Are any of the readers of this list maintaining a month-by-month count of the total use by their library of _every_ ejournal they receive? (Not just the journals from a particular publisher or distributor.) I have been asked to provide an estimate of the work involved. Please contact me off list. -- David Goodman Biology Librarian and Co-chair, Electronic Journals Task force Princeton University Library Princeton, NJ 08544-0001 phone: 609-258-3235 fax: 609-258-2627 e-mail: dgoodman@princeton.edu