Dear All
Lots of responses coming in about this so I'll summarise and feed back to the list hopefully by the end of the week. The general feeling at the moment seems to be that this is a knee-jerk reaction to a regulation that doesn't come into force for another 10 months and that we can continue collecting visitor stats if we give website visitors the option to opt out (these wont include the stats of customers who opt-out though). Interesting that some libraries count each visit to their web pages as a virtual visit but others only count those to the online catalogue.
I would imagine any visit where a customer uses the website to find out about opening times, perhaps join online or access an online subscription website should count as a virtual visit. In fact any visit to a libraries event record published on a corporate online events calendar should count too really although these often aren't located within the pages registered to libraries on Google analytics. Nor, come to it, are community information databases provided by external providers, online PC booking modules or online library catalogues if they're hosted by an LMS provider.
Unless all these library-provided resources are registered with Google Analytics we are seriously undercounting our virtual visits and hence appearing far more expensive per visit than we actually are. I sense potential for a research project here unless there's already one in existence...
Kind regards
Phil Jones
ICT & Information Coordinator
Coventry Libraries and Information Services
Floor 1, West Orchards House
28-34 Corporation Street
Coventry
CV1 1GF
Tel: 024 7683 2329
Fax: 024 7683 2180
Email:[log in to unmask]
Visit us at www.coventry.gov.uk/libraries
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