On 03/18/2013 05:29 PM, Ed Summers wrote:
They also figure prominently in annual reports that are used by funding bodies to evaluate their investments. In your work with Swedish archives and libraries I would encourage you to try to understand what metrics those organizations *do* currently care about, and trying to expand the scope of those metrics to include Web traffic.
This is what I'm trying to do, but it's confusing. Web traffic is only reported in the annual reports of some institutions, and not in conjunction with foot traffic, and not following any standardized format. I have no indication of any instituion that has funding related to web traffic.
For libraries, Sweden's national library fought for and won the right to be the national statistics collector, and among the thing they ask local libraries about is web traffic. However, the numbers are quite random and nobody seems to care about them. For my local area, three municipal public library websites show in 2011:
Linköping 161,221 page views, serving 148,521 inhabitants Mjölby 301,911 page views, serving 26,195 inhabitants Norrköping 2,090,275 page views, serving 132,124 inhabitants
Source: http://www.kb.se/bibliotek/Statistik-kvalitet/biblioteksstatistik/Bibliotek-... (Folkbibliotek 2011 tabell, tab F.12)
As you can compute, Norrköping has 15.8 page views per inhabitant and year, Mjölby has 11.5, and Linköping has 1.08, but this is not any cause for alarm or scandal in Linköping. If they thought this was bad, they could easily hire people to do a better job on the web, but they are in no hurry. And thus, they are not really interested in Wikipedia.
From Sweden, Wikipedia has 16 page views per Internet user (~ inhabitant of the country) and *month*, by the way, http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportPageViewsPerCountryOv...
It would be very different if a national endowment was constructed that bought web ad space on the websites of institutions, so web traffic was turned into funding. But nothing of that kind exists.