PASSWORD: ndsu
The following explanatory information (dated
April 11, 2002) is from Aileen Tien, Project Muse Website Coordinator,
Johns Hopkins University Press:
In autumn of 2001, in an effort to provide our
subscribers with more efficient and flexible usage statistics
reporting, we implemented a new statistics reporting system.
Among the highlights of the new system are the ability for subscribers
to query it at any time for a current statistics report, and
to request reports for any time frame from one day to one year.
While the "self-service" functionality of the system has been
well received, we are aware that there are concerns among our
subscribers about the contents and format of the statistics
reports generated by this new system. In response to these
concerns, we are now in the process of reformulating the new
statistics reporting system, with the ICOLC (International Coalition
of Library Consortia) "Guidelines for Statistical Measures of
Usage of Web-Based Information Resources" as a guide.
If you are not familiar with these guidelines, or would like
more information about them, please see the ICOLC website at
http://www.library.yale.edu/consortia/.
The new package is still undergoing additional
development at this time. An announcement will be sent
to subscribers when the revision is complete and the reformulated
statistics package is ready for use. The new package will
continue to offer self-service functionality and enable subscribers
to view up-to-the-minute usage statistics at any time during
the subscription term. In the meantime, to best meet the
needs of our subscribers, we have also run statistics reports
for Quarter 1 2002 using our previous stats reporting system,
which generates a cumulative quarterly report for your institution
and mounts it on a secure web page for viewing. Please
follow the instructions below for accessing this first quarter
usage report.
Each row in the current stats report represents
one journal, with one row labelled "Other" representing all
hits to journals materials that could not be resolved to a specific
journal. Only those journals which have been accessed
during this quarter will be shown. Each column in your
stats report represents a breakdown of accesses within a given
journal during the quarter. The following legend explains
the meaning of each column:
- ARTICLES:
- Article Hits -- this is the number of hits
to a given journal's full text articles. This does not
include front matter or front pages of the projects, nor does
it count illustration pages.
- IMAGES:
- Article-Related Graphics -- this is a count
of the number of hits in a given journal in your domain to
"meaningful graphics" (logos, buttons, and other graphics
characteristics of our site design are not included).
For some journals (such as American
Journal of Mathematics), "page images" are used
because of the complexity of the material; for these, an "image"
is equivalent to an "article."
- OTHER:
- A combination of Journal Informational Page
Hits and hits to pages that didn't fit the naming-convention
pattern of the other three categories. We are striving
to pare these down by improving the statistics algorithms,
restructuring file naming conventions, and other means.
These are still "meaningful" hits, which may include multimedia,
active images, pages describing the journal, indexing/abstracting
information, even editorial boards.
- TOCS:
- Table of Contents Hits -- this count represents
the number of hits to a given journal's tables of contents.
Please note that TOCs are volume-level, thus each hit represents
between 2 and 6 issues.
Note: If your hits for certain titles look low,
please note that some journals have only one volume of material
online, while others may have up to seven years' material included
in Project Muse. Usage is also dependent on the amount
of local publicity indicating Project Muse's availability.
Substantial increases in usage have been documented when just
a few instructors on campus begin using Project Muse as a "suggested
reading room" for research. Links to Muse journals from online
catalogs and/or library web pages can also result in a notable
increase in usage. Additionally, your institution may
not hold a subscription to the full text of every journal in
the Muse database. Some database packages provide access to
only a selected subset of journals. If your institution
subscribes to one of these smaller packages, you may still see
statistics indicating full text article accesses in titles not
currently included in your subscription. We provide one
free sample issue of each journal in Muse, so full text hits
in non-subscribed journals would represent patrons accessing
the free sample issue. If you see a large number of hits
to a journal not currently included in your Muse package subscription,
you may wish to utilize this information while making future
collection development decisions.
Remember in addition that statistics on electronic
journal usage do not correlate easily with reshelving statistics
that your library may have gathered on JHUP journals, or periodicals
in general. Search engines and the subject headings added
to the TOCs may both add and decrease usage of articles in ways
which have not yet been adequately assessed, while technical
issues such as local drive caching, the absence of "session
tracking" standards on the Web as yet, etc. will further affect
the size and quality of these statistics in various ways.
Published by North Dakota State University
Libraries
Last Updated: February 02, 2004