[Archivesspace_Users_Group] Advice about measuring use of specific collections (resources record plus archival objects)

[Custer, Mark]

Natalie,

When we set our system up, I was hoping that we would use Google Tag Manager (GTM) to do exactly that, but I don't think that we have configured things for that yet (and I've never used Google Tag Manager, so I'm just assuming that it would be feasible to do so 🙂).

Given how ASpace structures the URIs in the PUI by default, the resource ID is not part of the archival object URIs, but the resource ID is part of the metadata that's available for every finding aid component page.  So, what I was thinking could help here, is that at every archival object level, you could use something like Google Tag Manager to grab the resource ID from the metadata that's available at, say, record.resource_uri, which is surfaced as a link in a few different places, and could/should be added elsewhere, perhaps in the JSON LD of the HTML header, though right now that only includes a "part of" statement for the immediate parent, and not a full list of ancestor IDs.

All of which is to say that I think it should be possible to collect such stats but it would likely require local configurations to do so since the resource ID is not part of every URI, as you mentioned.  A better option, I think, would be to have both the resource and archival object IDs in the URI, similar to what you see in the staff interface (perhaps this is already possible with the new URL slug feature in ASpace?).  The default ASpace PUI, on the other hand, has never included the resource IDs in the URL.  I know that idea was suggested during the Cherry Hill redesign process in advance of ASpace 2.1 but changing the URL structures was not undertaken at that time.

Mark



________________________________
From: archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org <archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org> on behalf of Natalie Adams <na207 at cam.ac.uk>
Sent: Wednesday, September 9, 2020 10:19 AM
To: Archivesspace Users Group <archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org>
Subject: [Archivesspace_Users_Group] Advice about measuring use of specific collections (resources record plus archival objects)

Dear all,

We're collecting PUI usage stats using Google Analytics and thinking about what data we can extract about the use of specific collections to evidence impact and use by external users.

It's possible to look at data for visits to a specific resource level description page but, unless we are missing something, hard to collect consolidated data for the archival object records which are children/descendants of that resource. Ideally we would like to be able to produce statistics for the use of a specific collection on the PUI (including use of resource and archival object records).

Has anyone else successfully used Google Analytics, or anything else, for this purpose? Any advice would be really helpful.

Best wishes,

Natalie

Natalie Adams
Systems Archivist
Cambridge University Library
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