[Dspace-general] Statistics

[Tim Donohue]

All,

Just a comment on Leonie's praise of the Statistics we are using for 
IDEALS (www.ideals.uiuc.edu):

Leonie Hayes wrote:
> Dear DSpace Community
> 
> Statistics
> 
> 1. From a what works perspective there is already beautiful statistics
> implementations addressing the minimum requirements, I think the IDEALS
> repository has what I would be very happy with, these guys seem to be
> one step ahead http://www.ideals.uiuc.edu I can remember asking Tim
> Donohue about their implementation a few years ago, he said it was a
> very customised solution, please correct me if wrong. I also find the
> eprints and Fez Fedora stats are pretty good.

Thanks for the praise...much appreciated! :)  Though, some of the kudos 
should go to U of Rochester (http://urresearch.rochester.edu/), who 
initially created the Statistics package we use for DSpace.  We've made 
some local modifications (like the "Top 10 Downloads" list), but much of 
the original work was done at U of Rochester.

However, it's worth mentioning to all that although the statistics we 
are using for IDEALS look "pretty", there's still quite a bit of 
"ugliness" underneath.  The main problem we have is that our statistics 
package does *NOT* automatically filter out web-crawlers like 
Google/Yahoo.  Instead, it requires a person to go in and manually 
filter out downloads (via IP address) which look to be web-crawlers. 
It's definitely *not* a solution that scales well.

So, although I think it was already mentioned, I'd add as a requirement 
for a good Statistics Package:

* Must filter out web-crawlers in a semi-automated fashion!

- Tim

-- 
Tim Donohue
Research Programmer, Illinois Digital Environment for
Access to Learning and Scholarship (IDEALS)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
tdonohue at illinois.edu | (217) 333-4648