[WEB4LIB] statistics for academic library web

[Lee Jaffe]

I'm working on a campus committee here looking into this issue.  We're
designing two surveys, one about infrastructure (servers) and another
about content (pages).  I'm on the infrastructure workgroup and I'm not
at all comfortable with the content side of the project.  So far it seems
that they wish to do a census or enumeration of pages and then attach
costs to them, a process which can't help but fail.

I've been talking to them about other kinds of measures -- such as number
of connections into your site, for effectiveness, or whether you've had
the site vetted for accessibility, for quality -- which might give a more
realistic idea of quality.  It would seem also that stats as to what percent
of your site is getting hit might say something -- I'd guess we'd see an
iceberg profile with only a small part of the top levels ever getting visited
-- but the analysis would be the more valuable indicator.  So far, I've had
no takers and they are moving ahead with the tedious survey.

I also thought that some of the methods used to measure reference
service effectiveness might apply.  For instance, come up with a list of
100 questions regarding campus services and resources and see whether
they can be answered via the Web site.

In researching methodology, I did find one book on this topic:

	Buchanan, Robert W., 1949-
	Measuring the impact of your Web site /
	Robert W. Buchanan, Jr., Charles Lukaszewski
	New York : Wiley Computer Pub., c1997

-- Lee Jaffe

>We, at JMU, are in need of revising what statistics we gather regarding our
>web presence (and technology in general).  Would those of you in academic
>libraries be willing to give some advice on what objective data is most
>useful to capture?  We want to capture data that best illustrates impact on
>learning community and how much we have accomplished with resources at hand.
>We have good data for electronic resources and other more library oriented
>functions.
>
>Thanks for any help you might be able to offer, or any reports or standards
>you might be able to point me towards
>
>BAC
>
>Brian Cockburn
>Digital Services Librarian
>James Madison University
>VMail:  540.568.6978  EMail:  cockbuba at jmu.edu
>Public Calendar:  http://calendar.yahoo.com/cockbuba