Graham,
Thank you for your feedback and analysis of pros and cons.
Pros (as I see it): faculty will receive a regular reminder about the
repository. In our case, depositors are librarians. We deposit on faculty
behalf; no chicken and egg situation, but faculty involvement is low.
Cons: bad usage statistics. Sure, we do not want to report to faculty zero
hits. Is it really possible to have zero usage? If usage is low, the reports
may be scheduled to send bi-monthly, or even 3-4 times per year. If the reports
will go to depositors (=librarians), "bad news" reports can be filtered.
Administration do not ask our faculty for information on usage of their works
posted online, so no request for such reports from faculty (and no needs for
them to visit the repository).
In any cases, manual distribution of selected statistics to faculty seems as a
good alternative to start with.
At the best
Susan
__________________________
Susan Matveyeva, PhD, MLIS, B.Mus
Associate Professor, Catalog &
Institutional Repository Librarian
Wichita State University Libraries
1845 Fairmount, Wichita, KS 67260-0068
Office: (316) 978-5139
Fax: (316) 978-3496
[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
http://soar.wichita.edu
From: Graham Triggs [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Friday, January 21, 2011 5:09 AM
To: Matveyeva, Susan
Cc: Platt, Alice; [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Dspace-general] DSpace 1.7 discussion: Customizations
On 20 January 2011 19:24, Matveyeva, Susan
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Hi,
Is it appropriate to discuss desirable new functionality here? I am very
interested in automated delivery of statistics of hits and downloads to our
authors. Bepress Digital Commons has this feature. The system sends monthly
reports to the authors. Some our faculty mentioned to me how wonderful it would
be to receive monthly email update from SOAR. Personally, I think that
automated statistics delivery is the excellent tool to promote an institutional
repository and to recruit content from authors. I'd like to hear your opinion
on this matter. Would it be a good idea to develop similar functionality for
DSpace? Sorry if I jumped off the topic.
Hi,
I think that would depend on what you expect to get from having such a feature.
If the goal is to have positive reinforcement about the use of content in the
repository, then an automated email to authors (or depositor - it may not be
feasible to email all of the authors, unless the contact details are an
explicit part of submission), is going to report on whatever the stats are
(well, whatever the system thinks they are!) whether that's good or bad. The
number of accesses to repository deposits may depend on how well the deposit is
publicised, whether the same content is available elsewhere, etc. What would be
the reaction of depositors to receiving reports saying there were few downloads?
And it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation - an author needs to be
depositing into the repository in order to get those reports. The promise that
they will get the reports might encourage some, but there is no positive
reinforcement for authors that haven't already deposited.
In both of those cases, it might be a better strategy to distribute [manually]
selected statistics to the authors that you wish to encourage to use the
repository. Highlighting the actual success stories, and maybe even encouraging
a bit of a rivalry amongst the authors, might be more effective in not only
encouraging deposits, but in having them advocate and publicise the repository
as a place to access their content.
On the other hand, if there is active resistance to using the repository,
because the authors need to be able to report on the usage - regardless of
whether it's good or bad - then that would lean more towards the email of
reports. Although it's not necessarily clear that scheduled reports would be of
more use than providing ways for them to pull that information when they
require it, and technically I would argue there are fewer complications to
providing the means to pull that information, than to automatically distribute
it.
Regards,
G
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