Eresource link click tracking

Evergreen has a feature to track user clicks on eresources in the public catalog.

This feature provides usage data on eresources in the catalog. One potential use for this feature is to provide the equivalent of circulation statistics for online course materials.

Data can be accessed via the Evergreen reporter.

Data collection

This feature does not collect any personally identifiable data about the user who clicks on the link. The pieces of data that are collected are:

  • The URL clicked

  • The time it was clicked

  • The bibliographic record that contains the URL.

  • The ID, name, and number of any courses that use the bibliographic record.

Enabling the feature

The new tables can grow forever, so before enabling this feature:

  • Ensure that you are monitoring disk space on the server(s) that house your postgres database.

  • Decide on a retention period for click data, and set up the provided delete_old_eresource_link_clicks script to delete old data regularly.

To enable this feature:

  1. Set the opac.eresources.link_click_tracking global flag to true.

  2. Restart memcached and apache HTTP server.

Accuracy

Statistics from this feature are collected on a best efforts basis, and have certain limitations when it comes to accuracy:

  • It does not provide any guarantees against somebody deliberately inflating the statistics of a particular link, either through repeated network calls or repeatedly clicking on a link they don’t actually intend to read.

  • Clicks from certain very old, unsupported browsers (notable Microsoft Internet Explorer) will not be counted.

  • Major bots are excluded, but uncommon bots and bots that set a misleading User Agent header are included unless they are blocked at the web server or load balancer level.

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