Institutional repositories (IRs), by virtue of their ability to give increased visibility to the institution’s scholarly outputs, are valued for their vast amount of open scholarly content. Libraries wishing to demonstrate use (and value) frequently report the number of file downloads sustained by their IR. However, commonly used analytics tools are unsuited for this purpose and produce results that dramatically under-count or over-count file downloads. As well, although statistics can sometimes be accessed through the various repository interfaces, without an agreed standard it is impossible to reliably assess and compare usage data across different IRs in any meaningful way.
The first part of this webinar will explain the reasons for the inaccuracies in most IR download counts and will introduce a new web service called Repository Analytics and Metrics Portal (RAMP), which provides much more accurate counts of file downloads to IR managers, with almost no installation or training requirements. Aggregated data collected with RAMP also creates the potential for interesting new streams of research about IR. RAMP was developed with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
The second half of this webinar will focus on another approach at standardizing institutional research data download statistics: IRUS-UK, a national aggregation service, which contains details of all content downloaded from participating IRs in the UK. By collecting raw usage data and processing them into item-level usage statistics, following rules specified by COUNTER, IRUS-UK provides comparable and authoritative standards-based data and also acts as an intermediary between UK repositories and other agencies.