Top of the (Repo)Pops

A week or so ago I went through all the items on the LRA and looked at their usage figures since 1st Jan 09.  Normally I only look at these figures month by month, but it was suggested to do this for the whole of the year and hence the study.  Due to way DSpace is configured I could only scrape data for those used 20 times or more in a month – thus I can’t claim any great functional validity to these stats.  Took a while as well to do the number crunching.  But when I was done I was quite pleased with the overview that the data gave me.

What it did give once I summated the data was a very clear picture of the items in the repository that are being accessed the most.  We’ve passed this information on to departments and many of the individual researchers themselves for interest, and to reward them in a small way for their compliance in placing items onto the LRA.

In terms of greatest number of appearances in the top 100 (rather than in all 588 items in my list)- the top 5 Depts. whose work is most regually accessed on the LRA are:

1. Museum Studies
2. Psychology
3. Computer Science
4. Engineering
5. Education

Interesting.  But how does this rack up when you consider what proportion of the items on the LRA come from a Dept.? Psychology may have 11 appearances in the top 100, but with 241 papers there’s more chance of them being up there as part of a critical mass of papers.  So for interest I decided to divide the number of each Dept’s appearances in the top 100 by their total number of items on the LRA, to give what I’m calling Johnson’s Repository Significance Quotient (or JRSQ for short!).  When sorted by their JRSQ how does the top 5 look now?

1. Museum Studies
2. Institute of Life Long Learning
3. Social Work
4. Computer Science
5. BDRA

What this does tell me is that these collections are comprised of more papers overall that are getting high usage, though remember this is only taking into account the top 100 papers this year.  I’m giving serious thought to going through the remaining 488 items in the list and including them in the data set.  If there’s enough interest, maybe I will…

What does this all really mean?  Well nothing most probably.  The impact and usage of these items depends on too many variables to take account of in this quick and dirty analysis; such as custom and practice of searching for and using repository based items, use of personal networks to obtain papers, traditional journal usage, relative visibility on search engines of items in the LRA etc.  Doubtless you’ll be able to think of many others.  I’ve also not factored out full text items in the list from metadata only (this would be possible should it become a worthwhile endeavour).

UK Institutional Repository Rankings – July 2009 Edition

The Webometrics site  half yearly update of their ranking of world repositories is available.  For information on how they calculate their metric see here.  For further interest here’s the ranking of the top UK based institutional repositories, I’ve put their global score in brackets at the end, and those with mandates (as listed on ROARMAP)  in italics.

1. University of Cambridge (22)
2. University of Oxford (42)
3. University College London (51)
4. University of Edinburgh (71)
5. University of Southampton (74)
6. University of Warwick (123)
7. University of Glasgow (131)
8. University of Manchester (160)
9. University of Leeds (White Rose) (167)
10. University of Birmingham (187)
11. University of Nottingham (212)
12. LSE (215)
13. Open University (222)
14. Imperial College (225)
15. University of Bristol (232)
16. University of York (White Rose) (239)
17. Newcastle University (253)
18. Lancaster University (261)
19. University of Sheffield (265)
20. Durham University (302)
21. King’s College London (255)
22. University of Bath (309)
23. University of Essex (328)
24. Herriot-Watt University (344)
25. University of Liverpool (366)
26. University of Aberdeen (373)
27. University of St Andrews (376)
28. University of Leicester (383)
29. University of Surrey (406)
30. University of Kent (424)
31. University of Strathclyde (438)
32. UEA (476)
33. Cardiff University (478)
34. University of Sussex (486)
35. University of Reading (494)
36. Loughborough University (499)
37. University of Exeter (501)
38. Queen Mary University of London (518)
39. Manchester Metropolitan University (527)
40. Queen’s University Belfast (537)
41. Aberystwyth (547)
42. University of Dundee (592)
43. University of Brighton (626)
44. Royal Holloway (628)
45. De Montfort University (640)
46. University of Stirling (644)
47. City University London (669)
48. University of Salford (671)
49. Brunel University (678)
50. University of Westminster (685)

You can see the whole list of UK Institutional Repositories’ ranks here.  Contrasted with last timethe LRA has dropped down the list somewhat – with detailed metrics for our repository giving us the following changes in the sub-rankings for Leicester.

	July 09	Jan 09
Size	877	222
Visibility	378	186
Rich Files	363	125
Scholarly	422	125

 The most drastic change seems to be in terms of size, where a lot of repositories have clearly begun to be filled at a considerably advanced rate.  How the recent mandate at Leicester will affect these figures in the next 6 months will bear watching.

Blog readership – Feb update

Just thought I’d recap on where we are with blog stats.  We’re getting a healthy, if not enormous, level of hittage.

• Jul 08 – 195
• Aug 08 – 144
• Sept 08 – 276
• Oct 08 – 145
• Nov 08 – 406
• Dec 08 – 653
• Jan 09 – 746
• Feb 09 – 79

Obviously Feb is only three days old, but this does give us a clear upward trend.  Taking it as average hits/day

• Jul 08 – 6.3
• Aug 08 – 4.6
• Sept 08 – 9.2
• Oct 08 – 4.7
• Nov 08 – 13.5
• Dec 08 – 21.1
• Jan 09 – 24.1
• Feb 09 – 26.3

It looks like Feb is continuing the trend upwards.  I’m especially proud of the December bump, considering we had far fewer posts in December than normal and the long Christmas break.  Seems people were still coming on by to read the site.  Long may it continue.

LRA: Stats for the 1st week of Jan

Just had my first Google Analytics report on the LRA. In the past week there have been 1,328 unique visitors taking in 5,136 page views.

• 75% of people arrived there via external search engines
• 20% via a link from another site
• 5% came to the site directly from a bookmark

This could indicate we could drive more traffic to the site if the LRA was more prominent elsewhere across the le.ac.uk domain.  On the other hand it looks like all Keith’s efforts in ensuring we were registered in the various aggrigators and search services over the past few years is paying off well; most literature suggests that visitors to repositories seldom use the homepage of the site to access individual articles.

Top 5 countries using the site

1. UK
2. USA
3. Germany
4. Singapore
5. Canada