[WEB4LIB] Re: Usage stats on the WWW

[Darryl Friesen]

Roy said:


>We are
>doing that presently by sending our links to commercial databases through
>a program that first logs the use, then redirects the user to the
>resource. I doubt that they even know what happened, it happens so quickly
>and transparently. See the sample Perl code below.


We do a similar thing.  Keep in mind though that these are VERY rough
statistics.  They will give you an idea of the number of times a particular
resource was selected from your pages, but not the amount of usage the
resource actually got (or whether it was used at all!) once the user got
there.

What you/we really want is detailed statistics from the database vendor.  I'm
not sure which vendors will, and which won't, provide that information.  It
would be great for us, but I can see them not wanting to spend the time
generating, say, monthly usage statistics for all their clients.  Could be
time consuming.  Then again, the ridiculous amount of money we pay for access
to remote databases should pay for something, shouldn't it  :)


- Darryl

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