Statistics Package for EPrints (fwd)

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 13 May 2006 17:31:13 +1000
From: Arthur Sale <ahjs@ozemail.com.au>
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM@LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: Statistics Package for EPrints

Apologies for cross-posting

Following Eloy Rodrigues' posting of an excellent statistics 
package for DSpace (I strongly recommend it to DSpace users), it 
might be opportune to remind users of GNU EPrints that a similar 
package has been available for EPrints for about 18 months. It is 
downloadable from 
http://eprints.comp.utas.edu.au:81/archive/00000262/.

The Statistics Add-on to the EPrints platform is responsible for 
the gathering, processing and presentation of access, content and 
administrative statistics generated by EPrints usage. It was 
developed at UTas = University of Tasmania (Australia) based on 
principles established by The University of Melbourne (Australia) 
and the package was subsequently enhanced by feedback from the 
University of Otago (New Zealand). Authors/depositors respond 
very favorably to access to statistics about their papers, 
especially if they are required to deposit (a "mandate"). They 
then see a reason for depositing!

The system was designed to be adjustable to any environment, 
because the components can easily be configured, changed or 
extended, to respond to different information needs. The modules 
are written in php and work off the archive logs with a few 
(minimal) hooks into the Eprints mySQL database, mainly to 
retrieve document titles. The insertion of new links on the entry 
pages and the metadata display pages are usual. All the code is 
open-source.

Important features of the UTas statistics system:

* Almost real time processing of event logs (adjustable from once 
a day - most of us - to more frequently)

* Database based stored data (in a separate MySQL database)

* Detection and processing of the country of origin of accesses, 
with the local campus separated out from the local country due to 
its different characteristics

* Monthly download stats - allows detection of citation or 
presentation events

* List of documents by access frequency in 4 weeks, monthly, 
yearly or total (customizable)

* User-friendly graphics and tabular data, pretty realistic flags

For examples, see in alphabetical order Arizona 
http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/, Otago http://eprints.otago.ac.nz/, 
Rhodes http:// <http://eprints.ru.ac.za/> eprints.ru.ac.za, or 
UTas http://eprints.comp.utas.edu.au:81/. In all cases look for 
the Detailed Statistics link on the entry page for which I give 
the URL, or browse for any document and you should find a link on 
the metadata page. Hope you like what you see and install it too. 
Let me know if you do.

Arthur Sale
Professor of Computing (Research)
University of Tasmania
Australia