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    Campus-specific Syndetics usage statistics

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    • Article Type: General
    • Product: Aleph
    • Product Version: 16.02

    Description:
    I have an inquiry from one of our consortium members about obtaining campus-specific usage information/statistics in regards to the Syndetics elements in the ALEPH catalog (book cover image, TOC, etc.) This could be simply the number of times users clicked on the cover image; more info (time period, additional clicks, etc.) would be even better.

    The indication I have is that we are not currently logging any information in this regard. Syndetics indicates that they can provide global information for the entire SUNY consortium, but not information at the campus level.

    Is there a way to track/measure this activity?

    Resolution:
    It does not appear that there is any built-in mechanism for logging the type of statistics you want.

    I would suggest that there are two general approaches you could use to do this. The first involves a change at the Syndetics end while the second would require some programming on your end.

    1. You have set up your linking to Syndetics in such a way that each campus could have a different client code with them. However, as far as I can tell, all campuses are using the same client code. If you established separate client codes for each campus with Syndetics, they should be able to report to you campus-level statistics.

    2. You could alter the program syndetics.pl to do some kind of statistics gathering for you or to facilitate your doing this through some other means. For instance, you could add an extra parameter to the Syndetics URL that would include the campus in some way. Right now, for example, your Syndetics URLs look like this:

    http://www.syndetics.com/index.aspx?isbn=9780545010221 :/index.html&client=abcd&type=xw12

    You could add a campus code to them and it should not affect the link:

    http://www.syndetics.com/index.aspx?isbn=9780545010221 :/index.html&client=abcd&type=xw12&campus=ghi

    Once you have added something like this, you should be able to get sufficient information from your apache logs to break down the usage by campus.

    Another possibility for this approach would be to put some kind of wrapper around the Syndetics URL so that when people click on the cover image link, you could log the usage immediately in some kind of log file. I would think that adding something to the URL itself would be far easier in this regard.

    • Article last edited: 10/8/2013