http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march13/szajewski/03szajewski.html
"This case study examines the use of Wikipedia by the Ball State University Libraries as an opportunity to raise the visibility of digitized historic sheet music assets made available in the university's Digital Media Repository. By adding links to specific items in this collection to relevant, existing Wikipedia articles, Ball State successfully and efficiently expanded the user base of this collection in the Digital Media Repository by vastly enhancing the discoverability of the collection's assets...
"The results of this study show that the addition of links from relevant Wikipedia articles to individual digitized assets in the Hague Sheet Music Collection in the Ball State University Digital Media Repository was an overwhelming success. Despite the fact that only 57 links to 40 assets were added to Wikipedia articles, pageviews for the collection of 149 assets roughly tripled as a result of this effort. The adding of links at the item level provided a plethora of highly-visible entry points to this collection's assets, raising awareness of the existence of these resources to interested Internet users who were previously unaware of these materials, as is suggested by the collection's use statistics. The success of this initiative is also remarkable in its efficiency, generating a large number of new digital patrons while requiring relatively little time to plan and execute."
Includes an encouraging graph. :-)
Sumana Harihareswara cited:
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march13/szajewski/03szajewski.html
"The results of this study show that the addition of links from relevant Wikipedia articles to individual digitized assets in the Hague Sheet Music Collection in the Ball State University Digital Media Repository was an overwhelming success. Despite the fact that only 57 links to 40 assets were added to Wikipedia articles, pageviews for the collection of 149 assets roughly tripled as a result of this effort.
Do we know to what degree archives and libraries succeed to actually benefit from an increased web audience? I'm trying to understand Swedish archives and libraries. Some of them measure web traffic, but none seems to care if the numbers are large or small. It's not like a revenue stream to them.
On 03/18/2013 07:09 AM, Lars Aronsson wrote:
Sumana Harihareswara cited:
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march13/szajewski/03szajewski.html
"The results of this study show that the addition of links from relevant Wikipedia articles to individual digitized assets in the Hague Sheet Music Collection in the Ball State University Digital Media Repository was an overwhelming success. Despite the fact that only 57 links to 40 assets were added to Wikipedia articles, pageviews for the collection of 149 assets roughly tripled as a result of this effort.
Do we know to what degree archives and libraries succeed to actually benefit from an increased web audience? I'm trying to understand Swedish archives and libraries. Some of them measure web traffic, but none seems to care if the numbers are large or small. It's not like a revenue stream to them.
Lars, I shall defer to the GLAM experts, but take a look at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Pageviews/GLAM . "To stimulate GLAMs to upload content to Wikimedia Commons, it is necessary to be able to communicate how many times these media files are being presented to users of Wikimedia projects. Being able to communicate these numbers helps policymakers to integrate Wikipedia into their communications policy and helps them justify contributing time and knowledge to Wikimedia projects."
Hi Lars,
On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 7:09 AM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
Do we know to what degree archives and libraries succeed to actually benefit from an increased web audience? I'm trying to understand Swedish archives and libraries. Some of them measure web traffic, but none seems to care if the numbers are large or small. It's not like a revenue stream to them.
You ask a good question. It's true, most libraries, archives and museums do not see additional ad-click revenue or anything like that as a result of increased Web traffic from Wikipedia. The most they stand to gain in this regard is increased google juice, as more inbound links can (theoretically) improve their relevance ranking in PageRanked search engines. I think this is the primary reason why they ought not to be seen as a spam threat by Wikipedia.
But libraries, archives and museums do need to be able to demonstrate that the effort that they are putting into making collections available online is resulting in an increased audience for those materials. Like WIkipedia the mission of most cultural heritage organizations is oriented around the spread of knowledge, and access to resources that support knowledge creation and sharing. Increasingly GLAMs recognize that rather than requiring researchers to visit their physical building to access materials, they can put them on the Web where the content is accessible by a global audience. Online access can also drive actual physical visits, where online access to the material is not sufficient.
As you know, there is a cost to putting content online (digitization, storage, bandwidth, software development). If money and time spent putting content online, but it is done in such a way that the content is not used, it does not bode well for future digitization efforts. In a way, web traffic is similar to more traditional metrics such as measuring foot traffic in/out of the building, or counting types of reference questions. These metrics provide a rough indicator of the use of collections and services over time. They often can provide indicators of what collections are of more interest to visitors, which can even help guide future collection development and digitization efforts. 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.
I think some GLAMs have done such a poor job of putting content online that they haven't been interested in Web traffic, because they looked at it once and were so disappointed. Sometimes this disappointment can lead to aborting digitization efforts altogether. Part of the reason why I built Linkypedia, was to show the Library of Congress that their (ancient and practically abandoned) American Memory website was actually used on Wikipedia quite a bit, almost every day [1]. I think many GLAM organizations are still in the middle of figuring out how the Web changes their organizational goals and overarching mission. I am personally hopeful that GLAMs are seeing that making the Web a better place for research, and building connections to similarly aligned resources like Wikipedia is a key part of their continued relevance and mission. Like Wikipedia, and unlike other market driven areas of the Web, GLAMs have a vested interest in persistent and open access to the stuff that makes knowledge grow.
//Ed
[1] http://linkypedia.inkdroid.org/websites/2/pages/?page=1&order=update&...
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.