New Web Service Accurately Counts Item Downloads from Institutional Repositories

"Researchers from Montana State University, OCLC Research, the University of New Mexico and the Association of Research Libraries have developed a new web service that accurately measures item downloads from institutional repositories (IR). An article reporting the research appears in the latest edition of Library Hi Tech.

The web service called RAMP (Repository Analytics and Metrics Portal) represents a dramatic improvement in web analytics. The researchers have demonstrated that page-tagging analytics methods, such as Google Analytics, typically undercount item downloads from IR because they are not designed to measure non-HTML file downloads, while log file analytics typically over-count due to enormous robot traffic.

The research was funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services through a grant proposal submitted by the partners in 2014 titled Measuring Up: Assessing Accuracy of Reported Use and Impact of Digital Repositories."