HOLLIS Plus Fiscal Year 2002 Usage Statistics
Scope
These statistics report the number of user logins (sessions) through the Harvard Libraries portal for the twelve-month period July 2001 - June 2002. A ' user login' is counted each time a successful connection is made to a given resource. The total number of logins reported for the year was 2,170,202, a two-fold increase over the previous year. Note that usage statistics are only recorded for licensed resources whose access is controlled via proxy or scripted access. These resources are identified by the letter I (Valid Harvard ID required) in the Harvard Libraries portal. Unrestricted resources and resources listed as C (Campus-only access) are not logged and usage data are therefore unavailable. Please see the sections below for additional information about these statistics. Report any problems or omissions to Ivy Anderson.
Resources Added During FY2002
A total of 1,760 new resources were added to the portal in FY 2002, including some 1,723 electronic journals. For these resources, the statistics that have been gathered represent less than a full year of usage data. To assist libraries in interpreting the results, the number of months that each resource with partial year data has been available online is displayed directly beneath its title in the detailed usage table for that resource. When comparing usage among resources, it may be useful to divide the totals for each resource by the months online to arrive at comparable monthly figures. If the number of months online is not displayed, the resource was available for the entire twelve month period.
Deep Links to Portal Resources
The highest usage in FY2002 appears under the heading "Deep Links." This figure is evidence of a dramatic rise in item-level linking, generally in the form of direct access to journal articles. Deep links are used for electronic reserves and for article linking from course web pages, and are also created whenever a user bookmarks an individual article or other entry within a journal or database. The OIS access management system is able to support and proxy such links, but it is not possible in most cases to attribute these logins to the resources of which they form a part. The effect of deep links is likely not uniform across either resources or faculties. Deep links can be created for any resource that supports persistent URLs, but some resources, such as LexisNexis, do not currently provide this feature. Differential adoption among the Harvard faculties of electronic reserves and other services that take advantage of item-level linking may also affect the percentage of faculty usage that can be accurately attributed to a given resource.
Users with More Than One Faculty Assignment
Approximately four percent of all logins during FY2002 were by individuals who are recorded under more than one Harvard faculty in the University's administrative systems. This may represent, for example, persons who are employees of one faculty and students in another, faculty who teach in more than one school, students pursuing multiple degrees, or similar circumstances. In consultation with the libraries, these sessions have been divided equally among the relevant faculties as fractional numbers. Thus, if a particular Medline login is associated with both the Medical School and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, it will be recorded as .5 for each faculty.
Undetermined Faculty Assignment
A small percentage (3%) of all user logins during FY2002 lack a faculty assignment in the portal logs. This problem, which first emerged in FY2001, appears to be attributable to the interoperation of the OIS access management system with the University's PIN service. When the problem was discovered in July of 2001, revisions were made to the logging programs which reduced the incidence to a negligible percentage beginning in January 2002. In order to provide as complete a picture as possible of portal resource activity during the fiscal year, sessions which lack a faculty assignment are included in the session totals for each resource and vendor, with the caption "Undetermined." Note however that the percentage of overall use reported for a given faculty in the detailed tables by resource and vendor has been calculated against the total use by known faculties only (excluding undetermined logins), since a chief goal of the faculty breakdown is to assess relative usage among Harvard faculties for cost allocation purposes.
Special Note About Science Citation Index
Science Citation Index experienced an unusually high level of use during January, February and March of FY2002 due to a research project that was being conducted by a group of Harvard users. This activity may have added between 30-35,000 logins to the usage statistics for SCI.