Dataverse 4.0 to 4.1 Tracking of individual downloadable file.

[Freeman Lo]

Seasons Greetings Harvard@IQSS and Dataverse Users,

We are using DVN 3.6.x with JDK 1.6.45. Its also possible due to my lack of knowledge on the current DVN 3.6 that i was not able to enable this feature nor found this feature on my own.  We are a bit curious if this up and coming release of Dataverse 4.0 would include this feature or function. The current stable DVN 3.6.x doesn't seem to allow individual files to be downloaded separately if and when an user selected two or more files. This is an idea of having a download counter on individual files to be tracked internally to Dataverse. After digging deeper into this, we realized that it might be cases where a researcher would like to know the exact number of times an individual file was downloaded by using a DVN account and/or from anonymous users. It might be helpful for researchers to post this downloadable item on their instance of Dataverse, this data file counter download information can be symbolized as a significant contribution to society, something to give to publishers, or even a data files which might be key to solving some specific problem in their field of research. It may also help them with grant proposals or something in that natur.  

By displaying this file download counter and logging this information in a DVN log inside glassfish with either a user account + filename or  anonymous session + filename would be a way to track it in the $GFLOG/access log files. I have a few python scripts to try to do a better job in counting as well as reverse IP looking up from the log to obtain a Canonical name of the organization who has downloaded something from a specific study.  

This is more of a way for DVN administrators to provide this tracking information to someone higher up on the number of times this one particular file has been downloaded, plus it might be kool to display it inside DVN. 

Froehliche Weihnachten und Schoene Neue Jahr !!!

Mit froehlichem Gruessen,

Freeman

[Kevin Condon]

Hi Freeman,

In v3.6, individual file download counts are incremented whether or not the files are downloaded as part of a zip file or individually. We plan on continuing this practice in v4.0.
Download information can be found in two places in v3.6: on the files tab it shows the number of downloads for each file. Also, as a network or dataverse administrator, you can view Download Tracking Data from either Network Options or Dataverse Options.

Hope this helps,

Kevin

[Freeman Lo]

Hello Kevin,

Happy New Year to you and Dataverse Development Team.

I see. Excellent. I will poke around some more on this and log into Dataverse as an user to track data downloads.

Many Thanks Kevin !!!

Freeman