Usage Statistics for dPanther

The following terms are defined below:

Collection Hierarchy	Collection Groups	Collections
SubCollections	Views	Visits
Main Pages	Browses	Titles and Items
Title Views	Item Views	Citation Views
Text Searches	Static Views

Defined Terms

COLLECTION HIERARCHY

Collections are organized by Collection Groups, which contain Collections and Collections contain Subcollections. This hierarchical organization allows for general searches and browses at the Collection Group level and for granular searches at the Collection level for optimum usability for multiple user needs.

In reading the statistics by Collection, views and searches done from the main page and the Collection Group pages are not within collections and so are not included in the Collection statistics.

COLLECTION GROUPS

Collection groups are aggregations of collections in this library. The Collection Groups simplify searching across multiple Collections simultaneously. Collection Groups also connect less tightly related materials to increase the likelihood for serendipity, where users may be searching for one topic and may easily stumble across something related and critically useful that they had not considered. Thus, Collection Groups are usually constructed topically.

As an aggregate, views at the Collection Group level do not count toward any particular Collection and are not included in the Collection based statistics.

COLLECTIONS

Collections are the main method for defining and collecting related materials and are the most familiar hierarchical structures for subject specialists, partners, and other internal users. A single Collection can exist in several Collection Groups, and a single Collection can have many subcollections.

A single item may be in several Collections, but one Collection is always selected as primary so all item views will be within a single Collection.

SUBCOLLECTIONS

The smallest collected unit is the Subcollection. A single item can belong to several Subcollections under the same collection, or to multiple Collections and to Subcollections within each Collection.

Because all Subcollection items will have a primary Collection, the usage statistics for Subcollections are also included in the Collection usage statistics.

VIEWS

Views are the actual page hits. Each time a person goes to dPanther it counts as a view. The dPanther statistics are cleaned so that views from robots, which search engines use to index websites, are removed. If they were not removed, the views on all collections and items would be much higher. Web usage statistics are always somewhat fallible, and this is one of the means for ensuring better quality usage statistics.

Some web statistics count "page item downloads" as views, which is highly inaccurate because each page has multiple items on it. For instance, the digital library main page, dPanther, includes the page HTML and all of the images. If the statistics counted each “page item download” as a hit, each single view to the main page would be counted as over 30 “page item downloads.” To make matters more confusing, some digital repositories only offer PDF downloads for users to view items. Those digital repositories track "item downloads" and those are most equivalent to our statistics for usage by "item."

VISITS

Each time a person goes to this digital library it counts as a view, but that means a single user going to the site repeatedly can log a large number of views. Visits provide a better statistic for how many different “unique” users are using the site. Visits include all views from a particular IP address (the user’s computer web address when connected) as recorded in the web log file within an hour.

This is also a fallible statistic since users’ IP addresses are frequently reused on networks. Connecting to free wireless means that network gives your computer an IP address, and then when you disconnect that IP address will be given to the next user who needs it. For a campus based resource with so many on campus users connecting through the VPN or from on campus, the margin for error increases for visit-based statistics.

MAIN PAGES

For each of the elements in the Collection Hierarchy, the main pages are the home or landing pages, the search pages, the contact pages, and any other supplemental pages.

When users conduct a search through the Collection pages and view the results, those search result pages are also included in the main pages. Once a user clicks on one of the items in the search results, that item is not one of the main pages. The views for search results by thumbnail, table, and brief modes are all included in the main pages for the Collection.

BROWSES

Browses include views against standard browses, such as All Items and New Items (when available). It also includes all views of non-standard browses.

SEARCH RESULTS

Search result views includes every view of a section of search results, and includes searches which returned zero results.

TITLES & ITEMS

Titles are for single bibliographic units, like a book or a newspaper. Items are the volumes within titles. Thus, one book may have one title and one item where one newspaper may have one title and thousands of items.

Titles with only one item (or volume) appear functionally equivalent to users. However for items like newspapers, a single title may correspond to thousands of items.

Readers of the technical documentation and internal users know titles by their bibliographic identifier (BIBID) and items within each title by the BIBID plus the volume identifier (VID).

TITLE VIEWS

Title views include all views at the title level.

ITEM VIEWS

Item views include views at the item level only.

CITATION VIEWS

For each item, the default view is set to the page item (zoomable or static based on user selection and the availability of each of the views for that item). All items also include a “Citation View” that is not selected by default. The “Citation Views” counts the number of times a user chooses the “Citation View” for an item.

TEXT SEARCHES

Text searches are item-level searches within the text of a single document. This returns the pages upon which the term or terms appear.

STATIC VIEWS

For each item in this library, a static page is generated for search engines to index. When an item appears in the search results in a standard search engine, the link forwards the user to the static page. Any additional navigation moves the user into the dynamically generated pages within this library. Attempts have been made to remove all the search engine indexing views from these numbers. These numbers represent the number of users that entered this library from a search engine.