[Dspace-general] Community admin.s; statistics

[Mark H. Wood]

On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 11:57:36AM -0500, Sarah L. Shreeves wrote:
> - I'd agree with Dorothea that the community / collection structure and 
> administration could be re-thought. We've actually customized our 
> instance and have added community administration functionality which  
> has turned out to be so crucial for us. It's allowed me to get 
> departmental libraries and colleges involved in IDEALS at a level that I 
> don't think would have been possible otherwise.

If you haven't yet prepared a patch to share -- I think this would be
widely appreciated.

> - Statistics and Reports - I know that there are a couple of stats 
> packages out there (and we're using one currently) but none seem to be 
> very satisfactory - or haven't been upgraded to work with Manakin.

I think that as we move forward on that problem, we need to work out
the various meanings of "statistics".  Different consumers
(organizational admin.s, system admin.s, community/collection admin.s,
contributors, users) want to know different classes of things or want
them presented in different ways.  For example, are you looking for
overall reports, or per-object statistics distributed throughout the
user interface(s)?  There's a lot of thought-work yet to be done, and
different sites will want to use different approaches.

[shameless plug] That's why, on the edges of this challenge, I've been
working to get code like patch 2025998* to a state fit for inclusion,
to make it easier for lots of people to plug into common object
instrumentation points and try out their ideas concerning the best way
to store, aggregate and present statistics.

Anyway I think that the failure of "statistics" to gain traction is in
part due to collective confusion over what it should mean to "do
statistics in DSpace".  Once we understand the consumer communities
and their separate needs, I think consensus will be more likely.

------------------------
* http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=2025998&group_id=19984&atid=319984

-- 
Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer   mwood at IUPUI.Edu
Typically when a software vendor says that a product is "intuitive" he
means the exact opposite.

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