Random thought: The limits of Google Analytics - it's just data, not information

I'm still wading through Google Analytics to get an idea of how the web site is used so I can have some 'evidence-based' proposals for the site home page and persistent navigation.

One thing that I'm pondering after my last blog post is referrals from Search Engines. If a page is linked to much more often from a search engine results page (SERP) than from another page in your site does that indicate your site is failing the user, or that the user prefers to use a search engine?

If a page is a common exit point does that mean it satisfied the user need, or did it just frustrate them enough to give up?  Does an elongated 'time on page' mean the content engrossed the reader or that they glazed over into catatonia?

If your total page hits go up down after a redesign does that mean you lost popularity or your site is providing the required content with a lot less clicks?

I think I could argue two opposite sides to almost anything Analytics appears to hint at - each supposition on a facet of Analytics would probably make an ideal topic for a formal debate in the vein of 'can money by happiness' or 'is honesty the best policy'

The answer is site Analytics on their own are ambiguous guides to user behaviour - you really need to observe, consult and 'know' your users. 

Analytics' value is in aggregating data so you can visualise behaviours that prompts you to formulate questions like WHY IS IT DOING THAT? IS THAT A GOOD THING?

If only users could be consulted in large numbers at any time that was convenient to me.

PS GA has some tables of Google Queries mapped against how often a page from your site  appeared in a SERP and how often one of your pages was clicked on, referred to as CTR (Click Through Rate).  It makes for interesting perusing, maybe one approach would be to interpret user goal from the search, and then see how closely the target page matched or referred to the goal.  An iterative approach that would probably improve user experience over time, but it would be difficult evaluate the impact.

Analysis of that information is making me think about using Summon's Best Bets

Next Summon Upgrade August 2

Andrew Nagy from Serials Solutions advises that the next fortnightly Summon upgrade is due August 2 (US Pacific Time I imagine) so we should see it next Wednesday. As usual there should be no interruption to service availability.

Enhancements

• Improved Search Results Design – Availability message will now be more accurate for non textual items including print materials. Subject terms are now links to a new search for records with the subject term. Record display has been streamlined to allow for more records to be displayed on the screen.
• Summon Mobile – The Library Catalog filter will now be available if you have enabled it in the Administration Console. ISBN numbers will no longer be converted into a phone number for iPhone and Android devices. Availability message for catalog records now links to the OPAC. Entire record is now clickable, rather than just the title – enhancing usability.

Newly Indexed Content

• Cambridge Histories Online – This collection includes over 280 volumes from historical subject areas.
• Cambridge Collections Online - The Complete Cambridge Companions is a complete collection and as two sub-collections comprising the Cambridge Companions in Literature and Classics and the Cambridge Companions in Philosophy, Religion and Culture.
• British History Online - A digital library containing some of the core printed primary and secondary sources for the medieval and modern history of the British Isles. Created by the Institute of Historical Research and the History of Parliament Trust.
• The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) - the largest professional society in the world for professionals in the field of operations research (O.R.), management science, and business analytics.

More Summon Tweaks coming

Andrew Nagy from Serials Solutions has previewed some changes to the summary results information to aid users in selecting articles without having to click on preview. These include some text from the abstract and any available subject headings.

In addition the text of the format icon's fulltext overlay will say 'online' in stead of 'full text' to hopefully resolving the issue of 'Full text' being an inappropriate label for streaming media for example.
You can preview upcoming changes at any time using  http://jcu.uipreview.summon.serialssolutions.com/

Summon Format Icons part 2

Suzy followed up with a key:

Column 1
.icon-book
.icon-conferenceproceeding
.icon-dissertation
.icon-ebook
.icon-governmentdocument
.icon-journalarticle, .icon-journal
.icon-newspaperarticle, .icon-newspaper
.icon-poem
.icon-patent, .icon-patents
.icon-report, .icon-reports
.icon-unknown
.icon-art

Column 2
.icon-map
.icon-audiorecording
.icon-computerfile
.icon-photograph
.icon-videorecording
.icon-microfilm
.icon-manuscript
.icon-researchguide, .icon-webresource
.icon-musicmanuscript, .icon-musicscore
.icon-specialcollection
.icon-kit
.icon-coursereading
.icon-realia

Column 3
.icon-musiccd
.icon-videodvd, .icon-dvd
.icon-videocassette
.icon-audiobookoncd
.icon-music
.icon-audiobookoncassette
.icon-archivalmaterial
.icon-musiclp
.icon-mixed
.icon-artifact
.icon-software
.icon-compactdisc

Summon Format Icons

The lovely Suzy Shepherd from Griffith passed on a link gleaned from the Summon style sheets that shows the format icons used in Summon:

Summon usually overlays (via CSS) a 'Full text' icon: on the chosen format icon to indicate the items immediate availability online.  But sometimes the phrase 'full text' doesn't cut it for some formats, for example Naxos audio streams.

Does it confuse patrons? Do they understand what the little sun is telling them?  Is there a better wording? Like say 'Click to view' or 'Available Now'?

What do you think? Are 'full text' and 'online' libraryspeak?

The other issue Suzy highlighted was that  Summon isn't consistent and from the user perspective uses three different icons for effectively the same thing:

1. Book 'full text'
2. eBook 'full text'
3. eBook

So the Summonclients list is back on the format vs delivery topic I blogged about this time last year.

The Summon and the new ProQuest non-issue

A little bit of traffic on the Summonclients list this morning about what might be the affect on Summon of switching over to the new ProQuest interface. Which made me wonder just how broadly people have grasped that Summon is not a federated search engine. It does not search other databases in real time.

If there were any Summon problems at all with the new ProQuest they would either be:

1. A new record export/import issue between Proquest and Serials Solutions (given they are the same company it's no stretch to imagine that these were, or would be, sorted quickly) - which in any case would not affect Summon's functionality, just its currency.
2. Linking to full text on ProQuest via OpenURL might fail.  Which isn't a Summon issue but a link resolver issue, and again, if you were using SS's 360 Link you'd expect that to already be sorted. The whole point of using the the OpenURL protocol is so that any citation source can be linked to the relevant target regardless of platform.
   

 The second point also highlights a mindset I've noticed among professionals of thinking that your link resolver is part of your discovery tool.  To an end user it probably appears it is, but in terms of diagnosing the source of a problem I think it's crucial that librarians understand the linkages between data sources and the applications that sit on top of them.


That understanding isn't just crucial to problem diagnosis, it's imperative to see possibilities for creating new services to fill specific needs. For me librarians are the drivers for identifying client needs. I'm blessed with a group of colleagues who don't accept the status quo and will say 'why can't it do this?'


That attitude meshes so well with the Summon rapid development model.  Which again impressed me this week by solving the 'author ordering' issue, which I'd reported maybe 6 weeks earlier. I assume a whole bunch of other institutions reported the same issue, which pushed it to the top of the development queue.  And we didn't have to wait for the next version to be rolled out third quarter of next year.  So far I'm liking the 21st Century.

Summon Statistics at last!

The Summon admin module is now available in the Serials Solutions Client Center - complete with usage statistics. YAY!

I have had a bit of a play and my findings and the first snapshots are available on our Intranet (sorry JCU Library staff only) but the granularity offered is pretty impressive.

What I did find particularly interesting is how much more used the service is compared to X Search (our branding of 360 Search) - even though we never had an official launch or any sort of a marketing push. Even the inclusion of it in our information literacy has been left up to presenters.

Another positive is that the Brisbane and Singapore campuses are big users comparatively speaking. Use is rising all the time - it will be interesting to see if making it the default search box on the home page kicks up use signficantly, and if there is any flow on to fulltext downloads through 360 Link (aka Find It) use and the institutional repository running on eprints.

The number of searches per session has also increased over 360 Search - not sure how to interpret that.

On the down side there is no indication of facet use, or even advanced search use (well not one that was obvious to me) making it difficult to guage how intuitive those tools are to use.

How big is Summon right now?

I just noticed that the number of items Summon says we have within and outside of our collection.

Within our collection there are are:

65,022,106 items
Including:

• 51,749,144 journal articles
• 11,824,532 newspaper articles
• 629,475 trade publication articles
• 408,957 books
• 159,911 audio recordings
• 143,292 book reviews

With a language breakdown of

• English (63,431,926)
• French (166,902)
• German (126,925)
• Spanish (60,797)
• Japanese (45,541)
• Chinese (39,077)

When you extend the search outside of our collection you get
495,415,785 items

Including:

• 112,587,009 journal articles
• 361,490,384 newspaper articles
• 3,884,816 patents
• 3,551,703, theses
• 851, 262 books
  

With a language breakdown of:

• English (473,599,062)
• Japanese (5,571,128)
• Spanish (5,247,447)
• German (3,243,938)
• French (2,791,481)
• Portuguese (1,685,196)

That's a propos of nothing really except that it just struck me how big it is.

Format, Philosophy Of

I've been working with Clair Meade on how we've mapped formats in Horizon to Summon and have learnt things that make me ponder.

In advanced search Summon lists a bunch of formats you can limit by that our collections do not use. If a user selects one of these they would get zero hits, not because we had nothing that matched their requirement, just that we hadn't applied the same format name.

The format names are open to interpretation, overlap and ambiguity – for example ‘Government Document’ and ‘Report’ and ‘Web Resource’ could all be applied to the same document, but we can only map one to an item.

I’ve realised that many of the formats we haven’t used are listed because they are used in the ‘Beyond your library’s collection’, but as that’s not the default search target I smell misled clients. I've suggested via the Summon Clients list that the ‘Beyond’ box be above the format dropdown and the dropdown be populated with available formats live depending on whether ‘Beyond’ is checked.

What is a Format?

On the Summon Clients list here was some discussion about whether an ebook is a separate format or just a book that’s available fulltext online, and that's the approach Summon takes to journal articles (no distinction made between e and print). Obviously anything can be digitised so every traditional format will have ‘online’ equivalents.


I think the basic problem is one of philosophical approach. We (‘we’ being librarians overseeing the profession in the evolution from physical to virtual information containers) have accidentally blended two approaches:

1. The format of the information content (a picture, dictionary, moving image with sound)


2. The format of delivery (for a picture that could be poster, painting, 800x600px gif; for a dictionary that could a book, a web site (OEDOnline), or an ebook (from say Credo Reference); and for moving image with sound that could be Super8 film, videocassette, DVD, streamed media, or a download of an MP4 file)

I guess I’m wondering how many of our users will be happy to know that limiting to ‘journal article’ will exclude web resources, government documents, and reports that have the same ‘content size and structure’ as a journal article.

I worry that we use one field to describe two very different facets of a piece of information.

Has anyone else pondered this and decided on an approach?