---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 14:52:35 -0400
From: Minh-Thu NGUYEN <mtnguyen@COURRIEL.POLYMTL.CA>
Subject: Re: E-J statistics

At Ecole Polytechnique, Montreal, we have been taking "usage" statistics of
electronic resources for about a year.

In order to do this, our URLs have 2 parts:
- part 1 is the address of a local perl script which increments the count,
then redirects to the address in the second part.
- part 2 is the address of the resource.

Example:
http://www.biblio.polymtl.ca/cgi-bin/go/ojps.aip.org:80/ASMEJournals/Dynamic
Sys/
<-------------- part 1 --------><--------------- part 2 --------------->

Every resource's address has this structure, however, we keep statistics by
group. This means that if someone clicks anyone of the thirty or so journals
of the ASME, the group ASME will be incremented, but we won't know which of
the journals has been accessed. Which is kind of OK since most electronic
resources are licensed by group, and since we cannot afford to consider
doing this on an individual basis anyway .

Advantages :
 - have SOME statistics, PLUS a uniform way of counting and presenting
statistics for all resources.
 - have complete stats of computers in the home domain

Disadvantages :
 - need to insert the script's address in each resources to count.
 - link checking programs do not check redirected addresses (only report the
redirection), so we have to produce a list of such addresses, take out the
srcipt's address then run the checker program.
 - users probably bookmark their favorite journals which may or may not
contain our script.
 - every click is counted, not the sessions (the sessions are on the
publishers' servers)
 - need to manipulate the stats to address the following problems:
     . robots and people from outside (they might or might not be able to
access after all but the clicks are counted)
     . people using Internet services and our proxy server.

I would have to say that all this is quite time consuming ! We try to limit
this control to paid resources, and as mentioned, as groups.

Hope this helps.
Minh-Thu Nguyen
Ecole Polytechnique, Montreal
mtnguyen@mail.polymtl.ca

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 13:28:13 -0400
From: David Goodman <dgoodman@Princeton.EDU>
Subject: E-J statistics

Are any of the readers of this list maintaining a month-by-month count
of the total use by their library of _every_ ejournal they receive? (Not
just the journals from a particular publisher or distributor.) I have
been asked to provide an estimate of the work involved.
Please contact me off list.

--
David Goodman
Biology Librarian
and Co-chair, Electronic Journals Task force
Princeton University Library
Princeton, NJ 08544-0001
phone: 609-258-3235
fax: 609-258-2627
e-mail: dgoodman@princeton.edu