2015 Charleston Library Conference

Many libraries suffer from budget cuts and exchange rate fluctuations. They can optimize their (usage-base) subscriptions using the journal access statistics from their organization. Such statistics is usually provided by publishers in a COUNTER-compliant format, which only includes total access numbers without revealing access patterns and internal details, such as access filtering. NIMS Library uses a proxy server to access e-journals, which logs all HTTP requests to journal websites. If we can map URLs in the log files to journals then we can compare them with the COUNTER-based statistics and obtain more accurate and detailed usage reports. For this purpose, we have developed an access log analyzer, which includes mapping rules from URLs to journals and can be tuned by the librarians. In this survey, we will show the following:
- How this log analyzer and mapping function work
- How we can distinguish accesses to the full text, abstract and supplementary content from access logs
- How we integrate the log analyzer to other library systems such as ERMS
- How we analyze access to journals from different publishers
- Difficulties in creating and updating mapping rules per publisher
- The differences between the COUNTER-based usage statics and actual access numbers