Tracking OERs: Web usage stats

This page is one of several describing technical approaches to tracking the use of OERs.

If one has access to the log files kept by the web server hosting the OERs then monitoring how often those resources are downloaded from that server is routine since analysis packages have long existed for such tasks on any website.

This information may also be available from hosts such as web2.0 sites for sharing resources displayed as a count of the number of itmes a resource has been viewed on that site, downloaded, or embedded into third-party sites. This information is often also available through the host's API to facilitate automatic monitoring.

Information from the logs includes data about the user's internet domain, client software and platform being used to access resources. This may be useful if the number of visitors from a specific user group which can be associated with a domain is of interest, for example if the target audience is not in the UK. It is possible to get more information by adding non-functional parts to a URL, e.g. document fragment identifiers (#identifier) for which there is no anchor in the document. This might be used to identify the identity or version of the linking document.

The referrer logs also provide information about the link which sent the user to the OERs being downloaded, which is useful in providing information on who is linking to the resources, and incidentally on the keyword terms being used to find the resources in search engines.

The extensive use of caches, web crawling robots (e.g. by search engines) and the general impossibility of knowing whether a file that was downloaded was actually viewed render the results suspect for any use other than qualitative comparison between resources from servers where the logging and analysis routines are know to be similar.