[WEB4LIB] Re: Collecting Stats.

[Dan Lester]

At 12:49 PM 10/26/99 -0700, George Porter wrote:
>Dan Lester has some excellent standard categories of statistics.

Thanks.  They work pretty well for us.  I do wish I could get management 
folks a bit more interested.  At least they wanted some brief summary pages 
for our current accreditation visit, so they're aware of some of the 
importance.

>We do a couple of additional analyses at Caltech that can be helpful. We
>separate out, by IP range, library workstations from the rest of campus.

I wish we could do still do that.  We've been on DHCP for some time for all 
public machines, and most staff machines.  The DHCP blocks are not separate 
for the library from any other "public network" machines on campus.

>The library's website is the default home page for browsers on public
>workstations.  It is very instructive to look at the behaviors of the campus
>community without the bias of hits from every time a web browser is 
>launched in the library.  Since the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is managed 
>by Caltech, we also view them as a significant portion of our target 
>audience.  We break out usage from the JPL domain, too.

We do get the usage on public webstations in the library by having them run 
through the proxy server that blocks webbased email, games, chat, and 
greeting cards.  Those statistics make the whole proxy server routine worth 
doing, even if we didn't want to block those "nonlibrary" 
functions.  (students go to labs to do those things).   Among other things, 
the proxy logs show what words students used to search on search engines, 
what sites are most visited, and so forth.  You can also note some of 
the  "interesting" sites that make the top 300 visited sites.  Of course 
some of those sites are graphics intensive, so they come out higher on hits 
than they would otherwise.  Fascinating stuff, and of potential use to 
collection development as well.   Check them out 
at  http://lester.boisestate.edu/proxy/

>The analyses we do are primarily for the edification of the content
>developers.  On the basis of observed link trails we added a number of
>resources to our main page during a redesign last spring.  Many of the
>resources were selected on the basis of observed multi-click paths, 
>repeated ad nauseum in the web logs.

That's something we hope to do next year.  Thanks for the reminder.

dan

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Dan Lester, 3577 East Pecan, Boise, ID 83716 USA 208-383-0165
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