Who visits academic institutional repositories and why?: An analytical approach for a single high profile repository

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.