Longer term I feel one of the most important things I do is increase research impact. I also want to celebrate our successes and build goodwill, support and demand for our services.
One of the simpler things I can measure is access and readership of our institutional repository Leicester Research Archive (LRA)
We use DSpace for our repository which runs on a standard LAMP stack.
We work with IRUS-UK to compile COUNTER compliant download statistics which we can compare to other repositories and find things like our Top ten book chapters in LRA.
So we have IRUS-UK stats and we could also look at Apache webserver logs, we have Google analytics and DSpace also collects download stats.
I’m just scratching the surface working out both what I could ask given the raw data and what I’d like to know which might need other data too.
What I know so far: People come to us mainly from Google with about 10% from Google Scholar. Our downloads overall and every month follow a power law with the top 10 downloads accounting for most of our readership, then the next 100 most popular items each the next order of magnitude down in number of downloads compared to the top ten, then the next 1000 with an order of magnitude lower downloads, then a tail of order 10000 items with few downloads each. Other repositories show the same pattern. Our readership is going up rapidly I’m pleased to see. Some months we see a spike in readership without a corresponding pattern in overall website traffic. Our readership goes up some months compared to others in a year and other repositories mainly have similar patterns.
What I’d like to know: How do we compare to comparable institutions normalised by research output? Why do our patterns look as they do? How do we increase discoverability and reading of our research? What do we want readers to do next and how do we communicate those calls to action?
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