Statistics, metrics and Analytics for dspace 7.6

[Sylvester Chikoti]

Hi, is there a way for dspace 7 or comming version to have a mechanism to get analytical reports community wise, collection wise and item wise.

It would be nice if we could be able to know how many and what items are uploaded by who over a certain period of time such as daily, monthly or quarterly basis.

Also dspace should provide a report on how many people have  visited a specific collection and how many actually downloaded some items.

I have been asked to provide a report to the management about dspace usage, i could only see statistics which display just the number of visitors and their locations but not much details to make a nice and rich report for management purposes.

 

kindly assist

Chikoti, Sylvester R.

+255767106905

[DSpace Technical Support]

Hi Sylvester,

This is an frequent request for DSpace. But, unfortunately, the answer at this time is that detailed Statistics reports do not yet exist in DSpace.   

As DSpace is built/maintained by it's community of users, we've yet to locate and institution/volunteer interested in helping to build such detailed reports.  Part of the reason is that *statistics are very difficult to capture with good accuracy* and reporting tools can be very complex to build or maintain.

At this time,  if you need more detailed reporting, you'd probably want to use/enable Google Analytics.  There's also some early discussion about supporting other Analytics services like Matomo (but no official work yet): https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/issues/8414   It's very difficult for DSpace to compete with the capabilities of external statistical tools, so these are the best options for detailed reporting at this time.

Tim

[mw...@iu.edu]

On Fri, Jun 07, 2024 at 08:44:11PM +0000, DSpace Technical Support wrote:
> Hi Sylvester,
>
> This is an frequent request for DSpace. But, unfortunately, the answer at this time is that detailed Statistics reports do not yet exist in DSpace.
>
> As DSpace is built/maintained by it's community of users, we've yet to locate and institution/volunteer interested in helping to build such detailed reports. Part of the reason is that *statistics are very difficult to capture with good accuracy* and reporting tools can be very complex to build or maintain.

May I butt in to add that "statistics" means very different things to
different people. Serving them all is not only a difficult problem
but a very large and often ill-defined one.

The most common request is for usage statistics: how are the contents
being consumed over time?

But you also ask for submission statistics: what is the behavior of
contributors to the repository?

When I'm wearing my system-administrator hat, I want to know how and
where the repository is growing, and what types of files are coming
in, and the proportions of various file formats, and how all that is
changing. I also want to keep an eye on the fill-rate of the
assetstore(s) and the Solr cores. These is not quite the same thing
as submission statistics.

> At this time, if you need more detailed reporting, you'd probably want to use/enable Google Analytics<https://wiki.lyrasis.org/display/DSDOC7x/DSpace+Google+Analytics+Statistics>. There's also some early discussion about supporting other Analytics services like Matomo (but no official work yet): https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/issues/8414 It's very difficult for DSpace to compete with the capabilities of external statistical tools, so these are the best options for detailed reporting at this time.

>
> Tim
>
> On Tuesday, June 4, 2024 at 6:34:28 AM UTC-5 chiko...@gmail.com wrote:

> Hi, is there a way for dspace 7 or comming version to have a mechanism to get analytical reports community wise, collection wise and item wise.
>
> It would be nice if we could be able to know how many and what items are uploaded by who over a certain period of time such as daily, monthly or quarterly basis.

If you're doing *exploratory* statistics, you may be better off
extracting raw cases and loading them into a general-purpose
statistical package, where you can slice and re-slice the data as you
require. When one is exploring a dataset, one rarely knows what will
be interesting, or how to abstract it, until it is found.

This is something that DSpace could support better without a lot of effort.

> Also dspace should provide a report on how many people have visited a specific collection and how many actually downloaded some items.
>
> I have been asked to provide a report to the management about dspace usage, i could only see statistics which display just the number of visitors and their locations but not much details to make a nice and rich report for management purposes.

Now, right there is where I would be asking sharp questions, if the
request had come to me, such as: do you want to learn about visitors
or visits? Because it may not be possible to uniquely identify
anonymous visitors.

I should mention that there are businesses which support DSpace and
offer their own statistical packages.

--
Mark H. Wood
Lead Technology Analyst

University Library
Indiana University Indianapolis
755 W. Michigan Street
Indianapolis, IN 46202
317-274-0749
library.indianapolis.iu.edu