1. Five-State Government Documents Conference 2006 Christopher C. Brown E-metrics for E-docs: Getting a Handle on Virtual Circulation of Federal Documents Christopher C. Brown University of Denver August 3, 2006

2. Five-State Government Documents Conference 2006 Christopher C. Brown Government docs reside on over 1,400 servers. We cannot possibly expect to get access logs from all of these. GPO counted 1,416 unique servers: http://ww1.access.gpo.gov/gpoaccess/fdlp/tools/domains.html University of Denver counted 1,398 in local OPAC

3. Five-State Government Documents Conference 2006 Christopher C. Brown Even if we can track PURLs, what about all the other URLs?

4. Five-State Government Documents Conference 2006 Christopher C. Brown University of Denver Profile  70% selective depository  Depository since 1909  97,214 URLs for govdocs, contained in 69,341 bibliographic records

5. Five-State Government Documents Conference 2006 Christopher C. Brown We have added thousands of links to older documents.  Making of America  Century of Lawmaking  NASA Technical Reports  NASA ICASE Reports  URLs for older documents in GPO Access but not in GPO catalog records  ERIC Digests  Historical Publications of the United States Commission on Civil Rights (U. Maryland Law)

6. Five-State Government Documents Conference 2006 Christopher C. Brown GovDoc URL Growth in University of Denver ’ s OPAC

7. Five-State Government Documents Conference 2006 Christopher C. Brown How can we know what users are doing?  We are accustomed to circulation statistics / in-house use statistics  Can we get useful statistics for online use?

8. Five-State Government Documents Conference 2006 Christopher C. Brown If libraries want usage statistics, they need to derive them on their own. The URL prefix redirects to a library server for logging of date and URL.

9. Five-State Government Documents Conference 2006 Christopher C. Brown Tracking System  http://library.du.edu/findit/peak/redir ect.cfm?LinkURL=  We know every time a user access a government document through our OPAC.

10. Five-State Government Documents Conference 2006 Christopher C. Brown Statistics log records date and URL

11. Five-State Government Documents Conference 2006 Christopher C. Brown MS Access used for analyzing statistics

12. Five-State Government Documents Conference 2006 Christopher C. Brown Following the Process 1.User clicks URL with prefix 2.Stats are logged 3.User sent to target URL 4.Stats are analyzed 1 2 3 4

13. Five-State Government Documents Conference 2006 Christopher C. Brown URLs by SuDocs Stem

14. Five-State Government Documents Conference 2006 Christopher C. Brown Clickthroughs by Class by FY

15. Five-State Government Documents Conference 2006 Christopher C. Brown Top SuDocs Classes

16. Five-State Government Documents Conference 2006 Christopher C. Brown Tracking by Quarter

17. Five-State Government Documents Conference 2006 Christopher C. Brown Older docs do get used. Time spent adding these URLs is well worth the effort.

18. Five-State Government Documents Conference 2006 Christopher C. Brown Circulation: Online vs. Tangible

19. Five-State Government Documents Conference 2006 Christopher C. Brown Conclusions  Online access roughly parallels tangible access  Online docs in the past 3 years and the most often accessed  Any project to add links to older docs is well worth the time and effort  Fully 39% of all clicks involved URLs added not by the GPO, but by our documents staff.

20. Five-State Government Documents Conference 2006 Christopher C. Brown For More Information  Brown, Christopher C. “ Statistics for Online Document Use. ” Presentation given at the Fall 2003 Depository Library Conference, 22 October 2003, Arlington, VA. Published in the Proceedings of the 12th Annual Depository Library Conference, Oct. 19-22, 2003,.  Brown, Christopher C. “ Local Access Statistics for Federal Documents: Tracking Web Page and Online Catalog Usage. ” Presentation given with Susan Xue at the Fall 2004 Depository Library Conference, 20 October 2004, Washington, DC. Published in the Proceedings of the 13th Annual Depository Library Conference,.  Brown, Christopher C. 2004. “ Knowing Where They're Going: Statistics for Online Government Document Access through the OPAC ”. Online Information Review 28 (6), 396-409,.