Benchmark Statistics Service (BEST)

www.apsr.edu.auAustralian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories

Benchmark Statistics Service(BEST)

What’s going on with Australian 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


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 administratorsHow do the contents and usage of my repository compare with others?

Authors, depositors, usersItem/author usage, deposit patterns, etc.


All repositories can tell you…

What they’ve got


Many also show

How they’re used


But how does this

Compare with this?


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)


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.


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


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)


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)


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


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

Documents

Benchmark Statistics Service (BEST)