The usage statistics for January 2010 for the UF Digital Collections are now online here: http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/ufdc/?m=htu
The top collections continue to be the Digital Library of the Caribbean, the Florida Digital Newspaper Library, and the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature, with nearly 100.000 hits each in January alone.
The most used collections, and the total numbers with over 10 million hits to the UF Digital Collections since March of 2006, are always impressive. However, my favorite statistics are the most popular items by collection (available for all collections here). For instance, the Digital Library of the Caribbean’s most popular item is Sus mejores poemas by Rubén Darío. It’s been online since April 2008. In that time, it’s had over 30,000 hits. Similarly, An A B C, for baby patriots has been online only since September of 2008 and it’s already had over 47,000 hits.
The usage statistics for January 2010 are posted alongside all of the prior usage statistics, back to when the UF Digital Collections began in March 2006. The statistics provide a nice quantification of the extensive known usage from the increasingly more frequent patron emails, requests, and compliments. It’s great to see exactly how many more people the UF Digital Collections are reaching, and how much more the UF Digital Collections are assisting with research and creative inquiry.
2010-02-02
Do you happen to collect data with google analytics as well? It would be interesting to see that data as well. It is of course an interesting problem for digital libraries like yours to share this data, it isn’t exactly like the dspace, eprints model of “record view” and “download”. We are getting ready to start looking at how we process our logs to aggregate statistics on the collection level as well as the item level.
We don’t use Google Analytics for the UF Digital Collections because the dynamic URLs tend to make for confusing stats. The model of a hit/view is still confusing, so we added the definitions page to make the counts more comparable to other statistics: http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/ufdc/?m=ltd
Our stats are cleaned of robot hits, and search engine robot hits (Google’s Google Search bot and UF’s Google Search Box bot and all of the others).
Please let us know once your stats are out–we’re always looking for good examples so we can improve. It’s also difficult with the newspapers (there are cases where single issues are oddly more popular than other issues from the same paper, distorting the apparent usage of the title as a whole) and since UNT is running the Texas Digital Newspaper Program, your stats would be particularly interesting.