Transcript IRUS-UK

Institutional Repository Usage Statistics
IRUS-UK: the story so far and what’s next
17 July 2013
Balviar Notay, Jisc
Ross Macintyre, Mimas
Paul Needham, Cranfield University
Angela Conyers, Evidence Base, BCU
The Jisc view (1)
 Jisc began work in repository usage statistics area in
2009 – with requirements gathering and feasibility
testing (PIRUS)
 Now we are building and in process of delivering a
national shared service for usage stats.
 Recognised a growing need to measure usage - as
the repository infrastructure grew. (now 200 UK
repositories approx)
 Parallel work with OpenAIRE. Also library usage
statistics– under the Jisc Activity Data programme).
irus.mimas.ac.uk
The Jisc view (2)
 Usage is seen as important factor in capturing impact. Usage part of
the growing metrics infrastructure - which includes citation and
Altmetrics.
 Usage statistics supports – management reporting and wider
business intelligence gathering. National aggregation of usage
statistics for allows for functions such as benchmarking
 IRUS-UK gives JISC, other infrastructure providers and funders, a
nation-wide picture of the overall use of UK repositories
(demonstrate their value and impact).
 IRUS-UK could also potentially act as an intermediary between UK
repositories and other agencies. E.g. The EU funded OpenAIRE
project are interested in an API to the service to monitor usage of UK
FP7 funded research.
irus.mimas.ac.uk
The Jisc view (3)
 Jisc is planning the sustainability of IRUS-UK in the context of a
number of co-ordinated repository shared services.
– The UK RepNet initiative (scoping, co-ordinating and
developing technical infrastructure) coming to an end in July
2013.
– From August 2013 (for 2 years) Jisc will be building on the work
of UK RepNet to support sustainable repository shared
services.
– New name and branding will be developed for infrastructure.
– Jisc coordination and management of services (transition to
service)
– Developing the appropriate business models
– Build scalable infrastructure - interoperate with RIM and RDM
irus.mimas.ac.uk
Jisc services (1)
irus.mimas.ac.uk
Jisc services (2)
irus.mimas.ac.uk
Jisc services (3)
irus.mimas.ac.uk
Jisc programmes

Academy/JISC Open Educational
Resources Programme Phase 3
Resource Discovery

Managing Research Data Programme 201113

Assessment & Feedback Programme

Business Intelligence

Relationship Management

Content Programme 2011-2013


Developing Digital Literacies
Research Data Management Infrastructure
Projects

Digital Infrastructure: Directions


Research Data Management Planning
Projects
Digital Infrastructure: Information and
Library Infrastructure Programme


Research Management: Repositories and
Curation Shared Infrastructure
Digitisation and Content


Strategic Content Alliance
Directions: Strategic Directions


Transformations Programme
e-Learning Programme


Enhancing DMPonline Projects
UMF Shared Services and the Cloud
Programme

Greening ICT Programme

World War One Commemoration

Information and Library Infrastructure:
Emerging Opportunities

Information and Library Infrastructure:
irus.mimas.ac.uk
IRUS-UK: the story so far...
irus.mimas.ac.uk
IRUS-UK
 Funded by Jisc as part of UK RepositoryNet+
 Project Team Members:
 Mimas
 Cranfield University
 EvidenceBase, BCU
 IRUS-UK: ‘Institutional Repository Usage Statistics – UK’
 Enable UK IRs to share/expose usage statistics based on a global
standard – COUNTER
 Emerged from work done in ‘PIRUS2’ Project
 Publisher and Institution Repository Usage Statistics project

http://www.cranfieldlibrary.cranfield.ac.uk/pirus2/
irus.mimas.ac.uk
IRUS-UK: Current status

Production-strength service infrastructure

Tracker code: DSpace & Eprints , Functional specification for Fedora.

Collecting raw usage data from UK IRs for all item types within (33)
repositories


Downloads not record views
Processing those raw data into COUNTER-compliant statistics

Making available to the originating repositories for their own use

Providing an aggregated picture of the use of items in UK repositories

Published ‘Item Types’ Report classifying types of items downloaded

COUNTER PIRUS Code of Practice published

Evaluation, dissemination and community engagement
irus.mimas.ac.uk
The IRUS-UK portal
 Live demonstration
irus.mimas.ac.uk
IRUS-UK: Repository Totals
irus.mimas.ac.uk
IRUS-UK: Item Types Totals
irus.mimas.ac.uk
IRUS-UK: Item Type <->IR: Item Type
irus.mimas.ac.uk
IRUS-UK: DOI Summary Stats
irus.mimas.ac.uk
IRUS-UK: Title/Author Search
irus.mimas.ac.uk
IRUS-UK: Ingest Summary Stats
irus.mimas.ac.uk
IRUS-UK: IR1 Report LSE Jan-Feb 2013
irus.mimas.ac.uk
IRUS-UK: CAR1 Report Jan-Feb 2013
irus.mimas.ac.uk
IRUS-UK: what’s next...
irus.mimas.ac.uk
IRUS-UK: the old ingest process
 The existing ingest process has been described in detail in
previous webinars and presentations http://www.irus.mimas.ac.uk/news/
 The key point is to apply the COUNTER Code of Practice to filter
out robots and double clicks
 However the COUNTER Robot Exclusion list is specified only as a
minimum requirement – more can be done
 We’ve added additional filters to
 Remove more user agents
 Apply a simple threshold for ‘overactive’ IP addresses
 Substantially better, but we’re still not satisfied - we need a more
sophisticated filtering system!
irus.mimas.ac.uk
IRUS-UK: the new ingest process (1)
 We commissioned Information Power to:


Analyse raw data we’ve collected since July 2012
Test the feasibility of devising a set of algorithms that would
‘dynamically’ identify and filter out unusual usage/robot activity
 A report on that work is available from
http://www.irus.mimas.ac.uk/news/
 Key findings from the work are



Suspicious behaviour can’t necessarily be judged on the basis of one
day’s usage records or a month’s.
At certain levels of activity machine/non-genuine usage is practically
indistinguishable from genuine human activity.
Going forward, we will test out and experiment with the new dynamic
filtering
irus.mimas.ac.uk
IRUS-UK: the new ingest process (2)
 As a service, we have to be pragmatic so we will go for a ‘best result
for least effort’ approach.
 In each calendar month we will process logs daily

eliminate as much as we can with a quick, minimalist approach

insert statistics into a ‘Provisional Daily Stats’ table
 At the end of each month we will reprocess those provisional stats

Apply more comprehensive, sophisticated filtering

load the restated stats into the permanent daily stats table

empty the provisional table ready for the next month
 We can’t ever get to perfection in open web environment but, by the
time we’re done, we will be producing ‘the best wrong stats in town’
irus.mimas.ac.uk
IRUS-UK: Tracker patches and add-ons
 Available for DSpace and Eprints
 Eprints
 Add-on for 3.2.x and 3.3.x
 Not feasible to back port to earlier versions
 DSpace
 Patches for 1.8.x and 3.x
 But there are a lot of older DSpace instances out there
 We’ll commission 1.6.x and 1.7.x versions
irus.mimas.ac.uk
IRUS-UK: Tracker for other IR software
 We will have to look at other repository software platforms on
a case by case basis
 Fedora


Every Fedora repository is a one-off. - but some general guidelines are
available in Appendix O in the PIRUS2 Final Report,
http://www.projectcounter.org/News/Pirus2_oct2011.pdf
University of Hull
 PURE Portals

We’ve opened discussions with Atira and we’re hopeful that IRUS-UK
Tracker functionality will be available for PURE portals …
 Other platforms

We would welcome dialogue with interested vendors & developers Contact us!
irus.mimas.ac.uk
IRUS-UK: Exposing statistics
 We will be expanding The Portal
 Adding new views and reports
 Delving deeper into individual repository statistics
 Improving DOI based views and reporting
 Incorporating more metadata – Funder and Grant number
 SUSHI Server
 New SUSHI Service to meet COUNTER Release 4 requirements
 API/Web Service
 Expanding and enhancing the existing version
 Usage statistics for incorporation into Repositories
 Determining further requirements
irus.mimas.ac.uk
IRUS-UK: Community engagement
 Growing number of repositories sending data to IRUS-UK
 Currently 33 participants:
 Eprints: Bath Spa, Bournemouth, City, UEA, Glasgow School of
Art, Goldsmiths. Greenwich, Huddersfield, Kent, Kingston,
Lancaster, LSE, Middlesex, NERC, Northampton, Northumbria,
Open, Reading, Salford, Sussex, UEL, UWE, Warwick
 DSpace: Aberdeen, Abertay, Aberystwyth, Cranfield, Edinburgh,
Exeter, Heriot-Watt Imperial, RGU, St Andrews
 Others in the pipeline
irus.mimas.ac.uk
IRUS-UK new users’ survey
Survey sent to new users 2-3 weeks
after joining – 19 replies so far
Aim to get initial impressions from users:
 Best features of IRUS-UK
 Benefits of using IRUS-UK
 Ways in which IRUS-UK might be used
 Challenges to using IRUS-UK.
irus.mimas.ac.uk
Best feature of IRUS-UK
 Reliable, authoritative statistics
 Ability to benchmark against others
 Demonstrating value
 Speed and ease of set-up
irus.mimas.ac.uk
Institutional benefits
 Reliable figures to demonstrate
usage and for benchmarking
 Improving repository by increasing
deposit and demonstrating usage to
researchers
 Enhancing work flow and saving
time
irus.mimas.ac.uk
Improving statistical reporting
Respondents described their current methods of
collecting and using repository statistics and any
challenges they faced.
 16 out of 19 (84%) said they expected IRUSUK to improve their statistical reporting (3 said
don’t know/too early to tell)
irus.mimas.ac.uk
Open data
During this initial period all data in IRUS-UK are
open to all UK HEIs via Shibboleth/Open Access
Asked if they were happy with data being
open:
 16 out of 19 (84%) said yes, 3 not sure
Asked if their institution would be happy:
 11 out of 19 (58%) said yes, 8 not sure
irus.mimas.ac.uk
Some views from the IRUS-UK
community
 I do really look forward to using the download figures from your
portal. They are reliable and very useful.

It is a helpful service so far - and we are interested to follow
future developments
 Very useful service, would like to see further long term
development.
 Impressed so far, and looking forward to investigating further!
 Great work and hope that other IRs join up asap!
irus.mimas.ac.uk
IRUS-UK: how to join
 If you are a UK repository:
 Contact us at irus.mimas.ac.uk to register your interest
 Answer a few questions on the type of repository you have and
the version you are running
 Get advice from us on what work will be involved depending on
your repository type and version
 Implement any changes advised and then see your usage data
instantly in IRUS-UK with no more work from you
“The set up was quick and painless, which is always a delight!”
“Consistent collection of statistics without me having to do it!”
irus.mimas.ac.uk
Contacts and information
 If you are a UK repository wishing to participate in
IRUS-UK, please contact
 [email protected]
 Project web site:
 http://www.irus.mimas.ac.uk/
 Thank you!
irus.mimas.ac.uk