Archive Usage Statistics

To create these pages it was decided that the best way to produce consistent statistics for each archive would be by making one master file. This means that if we decide to change the format of the usage statistics pages we only need to make a change in one place. However, the usage statistics still needed to be viewable by individual archive and accessed from within each collection. To enable this a holder page entitled Usage Statistics which sits within each archive was created that can reference the master file in a central directory. The quickest and easiest way to do this was to query the ADS Collection Management System to find the directory names of all the project archives, journal series, bibliographies and theses collections that ADS holds and then write a shell script to copy a template of the holder file into each archive collection. Having this file in each archive collection also allows us the flexibility of customising the usage statistics display within the collection without having to change the master file.

A link to the Usage Statistics page can be found on the left-hand navigation bar within each archive collection. To create this link,in the left hand menu, prior to running the the shell script, a change was made to the file which creates the menu bar requiring it to add a ‘Usage Statistics’ link if an appropriate statistics page exists in the archive collection directory. A few archives which do not follow the ADS standard structure have their own menu files. In these cases the menu file was updated by hand.