It is important for any library to understand how their e-resources are used, who the most and least active users are, what they search and filter upon, what they try to access but cannot, etc. With these facts on the table, the institution can make better informed decisions on which subscriptions to keep and which to change, as well as how to effectively promote relevant e-resources to sub-groups of users, or invite users to training and awareness sessions as part of the library’s overall marketing and engagement plan.
The KnE Digital Library platform includes two types of statistics:
- User statistics directly on the Digital Library
- Usage statistics from the publishers (Counter complaint statistics)
These two types of statistics are described in the sections below.
The user statistics on the Digital Library tracks the individual users’ behaviour and records the used search terms, filters, advanced search combinations, items that the users access, etc. As each individual user can be associated with custom fields, such as org unit, role, campus, programme, etc. the statistics can be sliced along any of those dimensions as well as over time.
The statistics dashboard can also be filtered on any desired time period. That means that the institution for example can identify how many searches each org unit has made over time. The statistical tables can furthermore be sorted to enable the identification of which individuals, roles (e.g. students / researchers / nurses / medical doctors / …) and org units that use the Digital Library the most or the least. This can further be used to identify which org units to engage with and invite to a training and awareness session, or how to distribute the costs per org unit based on their usage.
For downloading the full text, the users sometimes need to go to the publisher’s site. In those cases, the statistics can no longer track the individual’s behaviour, but only what the institution as a whole makes use of. These statistics are usually collected and compiled by the institutions in a manual way by contacting the publishers, getting files with statistics and then trying to match them up.
The Advanced User Statistics includes the support for automatically retrieving the Counter stats from the publishers. This means that at the beginning of each month, the Digital Library automatically connects to the different publishers’ systems, and then collects and compiles the statistics in a systematic way. The institution can then for each month see what the latest usage statistics are per publisher, but also down to a much more granular level, including the number of downloads per journal and book title along with denials, i.e. how many times someone has tried to access an item that is not included in the institution’s subscriptions. Based on this information, the institution can make much more effective decisions on which subscriptions to keep and which ones to potentially replace.
Figure: Screenshot of a dashboard illustrating the Counter stats, i.e. the usage on the publishers’ sites.
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