Abstract:
Institutional Repositories have been set up all over the world, and are now mainstream business for
academic libraries and other organisations. The nature of the visitors or users for these repositories
is not well understood, and little work has been done in analysing the data the repositories generate
on their visitors. This report looks at the analytics generated by the University of Canterbury
Research Repository (UCRR) through its own internal statistics and Google Analytics. There are
many issues with reconciling this data, as many factors influence the accuracy of the figures,
including web search engine crawlers, deep linking, and copyright trolls. This report found that
there are many visitors to the UCRR, and that it is difficult, but possible to create narratives for
specific items indicating how they might be used. Generalisations, however are much harder to
make, and though we can see who is visiting the UCRR, we cannot really ascertain why they do.
This report provides suggestions for further research on repository users, particularly at gathering
qualitative data from groups identified from this quantative analytics.
