Stat attack!

I’ve become a little bit obsessed with monitoring the statistics for City Research Online recently, particularly Google Analytics’ Real Time functionality, which allows you to see visitors as they look at the site in real time.

Obsession aside, we’ve reached a couple of milestones in the last week or so. First, we had our first 100-download day, which weirdly enough was last Saturday the 21st of April:

April 2012 download statistics

Second, we seem to now be attracting more than 100 individual visitors day on day for the first time, which I think is indicative of the increasing amounts of traffic we’re getting via search (inevitably largely Google). I think it probably also indicates that we’re getting indexed more often and more comprehensively by the big G.

It’s also further proof that material added to City Research Online really does get found, downloaded and (presumably) read, built upon and cited.

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Filed under: Uncategorized, City Research Online, discovery, Google, search, statistics

OpenURL revisited

Our Systems Librarian has been working away at integrating repository content into our OpenURL coverage database, and we’re at a stage where it looks to be working pretty well. This means that whenever someone finds an article the repository holds in a resource which supports OpenURL linkage (e.g. Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Science, EBSCO etc.), they will be able to find their way to the full text item in City Research Online in just a couple of clicks.

For example, here’s a search in Google Scholar for a paper in City Research Online. Next to the citation information for the first hit (which is for the article itself), and depending on whether you have access to a link resolver, you should see a link. At City, it looks like this (click on the image to see an enlarged version):

Google Scholar screenshot

Hitting that link here at City runs a query against our Web Bridge resource coverage, which confirms that the repository holds the paper, and allows you to click through to the paper itself. I would be interested to know if this works for people at other institutions with OpenURL services- please leave a comment!

To maintain the repository’s coverage of repository resources, we’re going to do a monthly coverage upload of newly added material. There are also a few bugs to iron out, and we also need to decide if we should be trying to extend coverage to other item types (primarily book chapters and conference papers), since at the moment we’ve only uploaded journal article details.

This is a great development, and goes some way to properly integrating repository material into a variety of commonly used resource discovery tools. We expect to see a lot of hits from Web Bridge in Google Analytics, and it will be interesting to see exactly how many we receive via this channel. Finally, when playing around with Google Scholar to write this post, it looks like Scholar is (finally) indexing a good proportion of our material, which should also help get our material found!

Filed under: City Research Online, Systems, discovery, Google, Google Scholar, OpenURL

City Research Online now being (fully?) web indexed

A couple of recent developments to report. City Research Online is now being indexed in a couple of the key discovery tools for open access repository content.

The first is the Big G’s Google Scholar, which (other than Google’s all-purpose search engine, which has already fully indexed our content) is THE key tool for discovery of repository content. It looks like Scholar is currently only partially indexing the content of CRO, but over time I would expect it to crawl and index the whole thing. This is crucially important for discovery, since Scholar is often the go-to tool for researchers looking to find scholarly material, and repository material gets highly ranked in Scholar. Here is an example of a search string which returns a CRO result.

The second is a more specialised tool, the BASE search engine. Run out of the University of Bielefeld in Germany, BASE indexes content of selected institutional and subject repositories, then allows cross-searching of all this material. Therefore, if you search BASE, you can be sure you’re searching quality content from a wide number of institutional repository sources. Here’s a link to all of City’s records in BASE.

We’re going to be keeping an eye on referrer statistics from Google Analytics to see what effect this has on repository use.

Filed under: City Research Online, discovery, Google, search, statistics