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Author: search.filters.author.Koivisto, JosephSubject: search.filters.subject.Analytics

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    MDSOAR: Collaborative, centralized infrastructure for open access scholarship in Maryland
    (Maryland Library Association, 2017-05-11) Koivisto, Joseph; Klose Hrubes, Annamarie; Breneman, Kyle
    Our poster will inform attendees about the Maryland Shared Open Access Repository (MD-SOAR), a shared digital repository platform for participating colleges and universities in Maryland. MD-SOAR, newly emerged from its pilot phase, is now accepting new institutions. Any college or university in Maryland can join MD-SOAR and enjoy the benefits of having access to a fully-fledged institutional repository, as well as maintenance and development, at a fraction of the normal cost. MD-SOAR currently is funded entirely by the University System of Maryland and Affiliated Institutions (USMAI) Library Consortium (usmai.org) but also includes other collaborating partner institutions. MD-SOAR is jointly governed by all participating libraries, who have agreed to share policies and practices that are necessary and appropriate for the shared platform. After evaluating various vendors and platforms, the MD-SOAR governance group selected DSpace (http://www.dspace.org/) as their platform with University of Maryland, College Park’s Digital Systems and Stewardship Division (DSS), as their vendor. DSS already had experience managing a successful DSpace repository, DRUM (Digital Repository at the University of Maryland, http://drum.lib.umd.edu/). The MD-SOAR governance group and DSS collaborate on specific customizations, e.g. submission forms and metadata, for MD-SOAR. Customizations and other application updates are tested on an instance of MD-SOAR on a development server before they are installed in MD-SOAR. In addition to providing a general overview of the governance group’s process for the establishment and ongoing support of the MD-SOAR platform, this poster will illustrate the metadata framework developed to support a wide variety of file types across a distributed consortial user base. Furthermore, the poster will cover ongoing development efforts that will support continued platform usability and sustainability. Lastly, this poster will illustrate MD-SOAR’s partnership in research initiatives at external institutions, underscoring the platform’s importance not only as an innovative repository approach but also as a testing ground for experimental analytics methodologies. The presenters will serve as MD-SOAR representatives and will have information on hand for institutions that may be interested in joining the MD-SOAR community.
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    Blind spots, gaps, and unexpected traffic: A (brief) history of the transition to Google Tag Manager and new approaches to improved MD-SOAR analytics
    (2017-06-08) Koivisto, Joseph
    The transition to Google Tag Manager (GTM) seemed like an obvious choice for the MD-SOAR shared institutional repository: easier management of custom analytics tags, immediate integration with existing DSpace and Google Analytics infrastructure, and easy customization translating to better item-level statistics for participating campuses. However, now - more than a year post implementation - numerous issues with the GTM approach have been observed. In addition to breaking existing custom development that was implemented for recent DSpace releases, GTM was revealed to miscount metrics related to bitstream downloads and inbound web traffic from indexed search engines. This poster will provide an overview of problems observed with the Google Tag Manager implementation for the MD-SOAR DSpace instance and the custom tag development necessary to adequately address these problems. Furthermore, this poster will provide an overview of a newly formed partnership with the RAMP initiative headquartered at the University of Montana, a collaboration that hopes to support the development of a novel analytics approach that more accurately reflects platform and bitstream use. A comparatively assessment of gathered metrics will be provided.
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    Custom Analytics with Google Tag Manager: Assessing Usage Statistics on the MD-SOAR Platform
    (2016-06-08) Koivisto, Joseph
    As usage metrics continue to attain an increasingly central role in library system assessment and analysis, librarians tasked with system selection, implementation, and support are driven to identify metric approaches that simultaneously require less technical complexity and greater levels of data granularity. Such approaches allow systems librarians to present evidence-based claims of platform usage behaviors while reducing the resources necessary to collect such information, thereby representing a novel approach to real-time user analysis as well as dual benefit in active and preventative cost reduction. As part of the DSpace implementation for the MD SOAR initiative, the Consortial Library Application Support (CLAS) division has begun test implementation of the Google Tag Manager analytic system in an attempt to collect custom analytical dimensions to track author- and university-specific download behaviors. Building on the work of Conrad , CLAS seeks to demonstrate that the GTM approach to custom analytics provides both granular metadata-based usage statistics in an approach that will prove extensible for additional statistical gathering in the future. This poster will discuss the methodology used to develop these custom tag approaches, the benefits of using the GTM model, and the risks and benefits associated with further implementation.