[Dspace-general] Week 2: Statistics

[Dorothea Salo]

2008/8/25 Mark H. Wood <mwood at iupui.edu>:
> One thing to keep in mind about whole-site statistical tables is that
> there are already tools to do this for web sites in general, such as
> AWStats or Webalizer or whatever your favorite may be.  We probably
> should not spend effort to try to duplicate those.

Perhaps not, but if this is the direction we want people to go in, we
probably ought to document how to do it, at least informally on the
wiki. Does anybody have such a system in place?

> We can have
> some generally-useful stuff built in, but we also need ways to expose
> the raw cases in a useful form for ad-hoc analysis with
> general-purpose statistical tools (SPSS/BMD/SAS/Stata/R/whatever).

+1 Data for mashup is always good. I should have mentioned that a
desire I have is the ability to export/transclude at LEAST by-author
stats data for inclusion other places.

> Stuff to be inserted as one component of e.g. an item page probably
> needs to be built in.  Stuff that would be a page on its own should
> perhaps not be part of DSpace at all, but rather something we make
> easy to do with other tools.

I'm not sure this is the distinction I would make. To me, the question
is whether a given set of statistics needs to know anything specific
about the way DSpace structures the universe. So I might well have
special pages outside DSpace containing DSpace by-author statistics,
but it's impossible (isn't it?) to tweak a Webalizer install into
capturing stats by author. I still need to rely on DSpace to carve up
the accesses correctly.

> We need to keep clearly in mind the distinction between capturing raw
> cases (someone fetched a bitstream) and abstracting useful patterns
> from the collected cases (frequency histogram of this collection's
> fetches over time, last month's fetches broken down by nation of
> origin).

Well, developers do. End-users, perhaps not so much. :)

> What might be helpful is to provide some views or stored procedures
> that stat. tools could use to classify observations.  Such tools
> usually have good facilities for poking around in databases, but could
> perhaps use help in getting the information they need without having to
> understand (and track changes to!) the fulness of DSpace's schema.

Interesting. Where would this leave the average repository manager who
isn't using Stata, but just wants some numbers to show people?

Dorothea

-- 
Dorothea Salo dsalo at library.wisc.edu
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