Wow, I am impressed by the variety of replies.  A lot of good points have
been made and this really helps give thought and credence to our argument
to free our library website.  I am in agreement with many of the general
points made and find the suggestions helpful, this will be a bit of a fight
to get the library site were it should be to it is a worthwhile one and
your insights should help us.  Thanks everyone for your input.  I've sent
this discussion around to my coworkers to look over as well, it really
helps.

Matt


On Tue, Dec 17, 2013 at 5:28 PM, Cary Gordon <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> 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
>