Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories Benchmark Statistics Service (BEST) What’s going on with Australian repositories?

Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories What are repository statistics? Content information Numbers of objects Titles and IDs Authorship Subject Formats Location Creation etc. dates Access Usage information Event logs IP – user location Views Downloads Visit duration User behaviour

Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories Who cares?  Policy-makers and meta-researchers What products of research funding appear in Australian repositories, and how are they used? Gaps, growth areas, hot topics etc.  Repository managers and administrators How do the contents and usage of my repository compare with others?  Authors, depositors, users Item/author usage, deposit patterns, etc.

Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories All repositories can tell you… What they’ve got

Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories Many also show How they’re used

Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories But how does this Compare with this?

Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories At a grand scale…  Numerous discovery services and directories (OpenDOAR, OAI-ster, Repository 66)  Also some aggregators of content information (ROAR)  Many industry-specific standards, followed to some extent by some of community (OAI-PMH, SUSHI, authority lists)

Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories At a grand scale… Other relevant statistics projects…  JISC IRS has examined ways of using OAI- PMH to harvest event information, and has recently developed “IRStats”, a package to process EPrints and DSpace logs at the repository level.  MESUR and precursor activities have examined aggregation using link servers.

Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories What’s missing… The ability to combine and compare repository usage statistics across Aust. repositories.  Broadly applicable standards for defining and representing contents and events  Means of adjusting for variation between repositories, communities, disciplines, industries  Service for harvesting, aggregating and presenting repository statistics

Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories What’s the approach?  Short project to design pilot service, demonstrating the possibilities of aggregated usage statistics  Limited participants in first round: primarily research institutions  Build on existing work (IRS, MESUR, ROAR) and standards (DC, METS, OAI- PMH)

Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories What’s the approach?  Work with related groups (MACAR, PILIN, People Australia)  Interoperable (use OAI-PMH; software, platform and repository agnostic)  Extensible (future needs of new users, other repository types, new applications)

Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories Steps to an aggregator service  Identify a group of repositories for pilot  Identify priority use cases  Define scope, guiding principles, needs  Define data elements, schema  Assess and build repositories’ ability to expose standard reports as defined  Design and build aggregator  Present to users  Feedback, refine, extend

Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories Future possibilities  Integration with other systems (ORCA, AONS)  Use of OpenURL  Alternative to citation indices for assessment of research impact  Examine user behaviour; threads, use of related subject/author links