This discussion of analytics is especially timely for us at the moment. As
a museum with designated collections, from April 2007 we will be required
to report to MLA a number of statistics to do with visits, both real and
virtual. Specifically on the web side, they are looking for a quarterly
report of web site visits.
Currently we are using analog (http://www.analog.cx/) to track web site
activity, but it has no provision for the concept of "visits".
So we are now shopping around (with some Designation Challenge Fund money
from MLA) for a new analytics package that will be able to track "visits"
(the best definition of a visit I have found, based on log file data, is
based on a key of IP address + system + browser parameters accessing the
site without a period of inactivity greater or equal to than 30 minutes -
after 30 minutes it's clocked as a new visit).
Of the commercial packages, WebTrends has been mentioned in one MLA case
study. One of our hub museums uses FastStats which is cheaper than WebTrends.
We would prefer to have something GNU GPL and are looking at AWStats
(http://awstats.sourceforge.net/) at the moment, so would be really
interested to hear from others who are using it at the moment.
Many thanks,
Sandra Jackson
Computer Officer
Sedgwick Museum
www.sedgwickmuseum.org
Department of Earth Sciences
Downing Street
Cambridge
CB2 3EQ
Tel. (01223) 333456
Don't forget the Autumn meeting: 16 November, Natural History Museum, London
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