Usage Statistics

The UFDC usage stats are now online in great detail. The stats include overall, collections by date, items by date, collection history, items by collection, and definitions to sort out what all of this means. The items by collection is particularly interesting where you can see how many hits are on particular items, like this page for the Baldwin. Some collections, like the newspapers, are by title and issue, so I assumed the hits would skew to the first issue of any of the titles and they do in some cases, but in others the 157th issue is the most hit.
We’re still interpreting the data, but we’re already learning from it. For instance, Lourdes noticed that one of the University Archives Photos had significantly more hits than any of the others and in trying to find what made it special, she noticed it was the highlight image on the landing page for that collection. We’ve now added more highlight images for the collection that will alternate on reloads to help distribute the hits and provide more data to users. We normally try to provide multiple highlight images, but it hasn’t been a significant priority in the past and now we know it needs to be.