[Dspace-general] Week 2: Statistics

[Christophe Dupriez]

Hi Dorothea and participants to this discussion!

I would like to say that statistics are there for different purposes:
1) detect errors (why nobody looked at my site last sunday?)
2) provide KPI (Key Performance Indicators), measures that a manager 
follows on the medium term to take organisational decisions
3) investigate new hypothesis before investing to change the organisation.

For purpose (3), by essence, you need to "open" to analysis the detailed 
logs of the events and the data stored in DSpace. Generic programs like 
SAS or reports generators are the best to dig in data and answer to new, 
unforeseen questions. Everybody in the community will be happy to have 
this "back door" available.

For purpose (2), we need to know what KPIs are needed by IR managers. I 
will go further, new IRs and their managers would be very happy not to 
reinvent KPIs and to have good ones already proposed to sustain a 
documented IR development process. A very big part of DSpace 
attractiveness is (and should be implemented really!) that it provides 
"best practices" for IR management (and not only computing).

For purpose (2), Use cases, practices, measures must be designed 
upfront. It will contribute strongly to the overall specifications of 
DSpace.

For purpose (1), a more formal, bottom up, data driven approach may be 
sufficient to install validation tools (like the checksum checker) to 
ensure that DSpace operations are "in line".

So we have no choice: we have to listen IR managers (please come by!) to 
know the good practices DSpace must support...

Have a nice day!

Christophe
(peeking on the list when I should not during my holidays!)


Dorothea Salo a écrit :
> Greetings, DSpace community,
>
> I want to thank everyone once again for last week's stimulating
> discussion and impressive chat turnout! I have a new question for
> everyone this week, pursuant to some discussion on the lists:
>
> "Statistics" are one of the commonest requests for a new DSpace
> feature. Without further specification, however, it's hard to know
> what data to present, since there are no standards or even clear best
> practices in this area. What statistics do the following groups of
> DSpace users need to see, and in what form are the statistics best
> presented to them?
>
> Depositors
> End-users (defined as "people examining items and downloading
> bitstreams from a DSpace instance;" we may have to refine this further
> in discussion)
> DSpace repository managers (as distinct from systems administrators)
>
> What else should developers keep in mind as they implement this feature?
>
> Because it would be nice to reach a working consensus on this (unlike
> last week's question, which was intended to pull out as broad a
> selection of needs as possible), I think we should start discussing
> immediately. I encourage all respondents to respond TO THE MAILING
> LIST instead of to me.
>
> I will be holding another chat to discuss the weekly question. It will
> take place Wednesday 27 August in the DSpace IRC chatroom, #dspace on
> irc.freenode.net. I apologize to West Coast (USA) community members
> for last week's unconscionably early hour; we'll try 10 am US Central
> (11 am Eastern, 4 pm GMT) this week, and we may go even later next
> week if our European community members can stand it.
>
> For those who don't normally use IRC, there are two easy web gateways.
> One is mibbit.com; the other is specific to our channel and can be
> found at <http://dspace.testathon.net/cgi-bin/irc.cgi>. I encourage
> all of us to become familiar with the channel; it is a source of
> real-time technical information from DSpace developers, as well as a
> community in its own right.
>
> Dorothea
>
>   

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