Behind the scenes at the moment we’re tinkering away with the Google Analytics settings at the moment (there’s been a rather strange and unexplained series of drops in our hits which we’re investigating). One of the things we’re going to need to look at is the impact over time of some tweeks we’re making to the code that supplies the data to Google. As a result I found myself this morning taking a look at the same three month period over the past 4/5 years – as charted below.
Apologies for not being able to make the Y-axis the same maximum value (suspect it’s an option if I wasn’t running GA in IE7…). The way this year and last seem to trend is as expected a reduction in hits over the summer, and I was just about to declare this a regular trend when I spotted that actually in 2009 & 08 this doesn’t seem to be as true.
I have no explanation whatsoever for this trend – but I wondered if any other repository managers out there have the same sort of data they might be willing to share or comment on the above. Do your hits lose their vitality over the summer months, or are they just as potent as ever?
The only big changes I can point to on the LRA are an expansion from ~3,000 records in ’08 to ~7,300 currently; and a shift from <25% full text in ’08 to currently 50% full text as of today (although by the end of August this proportion will plummet as we expand the records on LRA by about 15,000 metadata only records).
So…do people use the repository less the more full text we get in here? That seems to run counter to every logical bone in my body. If I had the time (and the funding) there’s probably a fascinating research project to be had out of this; anyone fancy funding me to do my PhD studying trends across the UK? 
