[Dspace-general] Week 2: Statistics

[Tim Donohue]

Dorothea & all,

Dorothea Salo wrote:
> 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?

For IDEALS (www.ideals.uiuc.edu), we use AWStats to get site-wide 
traffic information.  However, that information is *not* publicly 
accessible.  We only use it for administrative purposes, since most of 
the information AWStats generates for us is generally *not* useful to 
our users.

So, for example, AWStats can provide us with the following general 
information:
   * Which features of DSpace are being used most frequently (e.g. 
Subject Browse, Community/Collection browse, search, etc.)
   * Which web browsers our users are using
   * # of overall hits in a given month,week,day,hour
   * Approximate amount of time users spend on our site
   * What external resources people use to get to our site (e.g. Google, 
Blog posts, Library website, etc.)
   * The top searches used to get to your site (in Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc)

But, AWStats only works at a global level.  So, it *cannot* give us any 
real information at a community, collection or item level, since it 
doesn't understand DSpace's internal structure and cannot parse DSpace's 
log files (it parses the *web server* log files, rather than DSpace's 
internal logs)

So, in the end, AWStats is a worthwhile tool to keep in mind.  However, 
without some major customizations specific to DSpace, it's really more 
of an Administrative tool to help you determine *how* users are using 
your site.  It doesn't give any real worthwhile "statistics" in terms of 
file downloads or individual community/collection access counts, which 
are more likely to be useful to your users.

- 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