ebrary Knowledge Base

Admins: Usage Reports

Once you’re on the ebrary reports page, you’ll have the choice of “Site Activity Report”, “Title Report”, and “COUNTER Reports”.

The COUNTER Reports offer reports comparable to the industry-standard reports; but they don’t fit perfectly the kind of data we collect.  Note that in the COUNTER 6 report the “User Sessions” counts have been temporarily removed due to calculation issues, please use the “User Sessions” count from the Site Activity Report.  And note that in the COUNTER 2 report the ”User Sessions” are a summation of views, prints, and copies (each access is considered a successful section request).

Use Title Report if you’re interested in what kind of usage each book (or books in certain categories) are getting.  For the most part, this report lists only the books that have received usage.  There will be some cases where titles show up even though they have “zero usage” here (it’s analogous to those books having been touched, but not opened).

Use Site Activity Report if you’re trying to figure out how many unique ebrary sessions there have been.

User Sessions in Title Report and Site Activity Report mean very different things.  If, for example, you run both reports for the previous month, you can think of the difference this way:

• User Sessions in Site Activity Report are analogous to how many people walked into the library last month (i.e., number of unique ebrary sessions).
• User Sessions in Title Report are analogous to how many books were handled by patrons during the last month (i.e., number of unique handlings of an ebrary book).
• Examples:
  • A person might go to the library and not handle any books (i.e., a user might go to your ebrary site, but not view the contents of any documents).  That gives User Session of 1 in Site Activity Report, but 0 in Title Report.
  • A person might go to the library and handle ten books in that one visit (i.e, a user might go to your ebrary site and open ten different documents in that one ebrary session).  That gives User Session of 1 in Site Activity Report, but 10 in Title Report.
  • Typically User Sessions in Title Report are higher than in Site Activity Report because it is more common for patrons to handle one or more books when they go to the ebrary site.

Interface tip: if you are setting custom date ranges, not only do you have to set the dates, but you also have to click the button “Custom (Select Range)” under the “Time Period:” column.

For info on where to access your usage reports or other admin tools, see:
http://support.ebrary.com/english/2077

Admins: User Sessions vs. Title Sessions

When examining ebrary usage reports, please note that there are two different types of sessions being reported:

1) User sessions – counts every time a user logs into the ebrary site

2) Title sessions – counts every time a user opens up a title (i.e., a document or book)

Here are some examples to help illustrate these two different types of sessions:

1. A user signs in to ebrary, performs a search, but does not access a title:
   1 user session, 1 search, 0 title sessions
2. A user visits the ebrary home page, and then leaves:
   1 user session, 0 searches, 0 title sessions
3. A user visits ebrary, does not perform a search, but accesses 4 titles they’d bookmarked earlier:
   1 user session, 0 searches, 4 title sessions

Admins: Site Activity Report, how “unique documents” are counted.

The count of “Unique Documents” is different if you ask for data by month versus summed up over a multi-month period.

If for example, you are running reports for the 8-month time period from August to February, and you ask for the report to be viewed by month, you may get a different Unique Document total for the 8-month period than you would if you run the report for that time period but not broken down by month.

This discrepancy between Unique Document counts is due to the differing time periods over which the “Is it unique?” question is being asked.  In the one case, it asks “Is it unique over the course of August?”, then “Is it unique over the course of Sept?”, etc, then sums up those totals.  Whereas in the other case it asks “Is it unique over the entire 8-month span?”.

Let’s say document X is accessed in each of the months.  Then when you ask about each month individually, it gets counted as 1 unique document each month.  Sum that up and it’s 8.  But if you ask about the entire 8 month span, it gets counted as 1 unique document for that entire 8 month span.