counting internet usage

[Gerry Rowland, State Library of Iowa]

Internet use statistics are a high priority for libraries at the local,
state and national levels.

Counting hits by local users against remote Internet servers has been a goal
of the FSCS, the national public library statistics project, for several years.

The counts, we understand, are fairly easy to get off an in-house LAN server
on a direct connection.  The problem had been getting a count of hits from
an Internet service provider when the library had a dial up connection.

At today's meeting of the FSCS group, we learned that the command
"about:global" in the Location: box of the Netscape browser returns a list
of files downloaded and a count of total files.  I assume that Internet
Explorer has a similar feature.

It would appear that a count of hits could be tallied over a period of days
or weeks, then multiplied to give an annual figure to provide a count of hits.

Is this the way to generate Internet use statistics?  I think it just may be.

Gerry Rowland
Chair, FSCS Technical committee