The difficulty lies in the details.

I don't understand the distinction between "organic findability" and "direct going to the URIs" (presumably URLs, which go somewhere). While going directly to resources would skew your stats, presumably in a good way, I don't see that they would impact your findability.

It should be easy to distinguish between traffic from search engines, links from your home page and direct links, which can either be embedded in resources like courseware, papers, and others or just typed in directly or using a URL shortening service. If your system can't make those distinctions, you should move to an analytics system that does.

I will dedicate next year to developing organic fundability.

Cary

On Dec 17, 2013, at 1:09 PM, Lisa Rabey <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 17, 2013 at 3:54 PM, Cary Gordon <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> My key point, and likely the only point of note is: "Your library stats should tell the tale of how folks are getting there."
>> 
>> While these data won't necessarily lead to great predictions of future behavior, as the institution might unintentionally (or intentionally) blocking some desirable access, they should give some empirical evidence of what is happening now.
>> 
>> Cary
> 
> 
> I don't disagree with you. But stats are not enough. The difficulty
> lies (lays?) that we have organic findability before the semester
> starts, then we teach info lit classes for 2-3 solid months where we
> are direct going to the URIs which then spikes AND skews the data,
> hence the problem of using stats.
> 
> Now if you have method to separate organic fundability from our
> teaching classes so I have a better/bigger picture of how people are
> finding us, I'm all ears.
> 
> 
> Lisa M. Rabey | @pnkrcklibrarian
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> An Unreliable Narrator: http://exitpursuedbyabear.net
> Cunning Tales from a Systems Librarian: http://lisa.rabey.net