(This message was originally written as a facebook
note<http://on.fb.me/gAfEBn>. The images and layout of the original
messages were lost in the copy
below)
Early 2011, the CSIC Cybermetrics Lab (Spain) will harvest, analyze and
publish data about online visibility of IRs in its Top 800 Institutional
Repository Ranking <http://repositories.webometrics.info/>. The January
ranking will reflect the visibility of repositories in different online
search engines. A limited time window snapshot of data is being used, as the
ranking production schedule shows:
Data collection: 1st - 10th of January
Analysis: 10 - 24th of January
Publication: week of the 25th of January
*Why would you or your management care ?*
The aim of the Ranking is to support Open Access initiatives and therefore
the free access to scientific publications in an electronic form and to
other academic material. The web indicators are used to measure the global
visibility and impact of the scientific repositories.
*When increasing exposure for your digital research output is one of the
objectives of your repository project, it's a logical consequence that you
should attempt to measure how well you are doing in attaining this objective
*. Although internal metrics are the primary tools to track the progress in
this area, the ranking offers great opportunities to identify and learn from
other successful repositories.
* Internal Metrics *
Zooming in on your own repository metrics, comparing them over time, allows
you to demonstrate progress in attaigning certain targets. If online
exposure is the target you want to measure, it can be very useful to take a
look at how many pages of your repository are indexed in the most popular
search engines. This is also a very important metric in the repository
ranking methodology.
To do this, you can either dig into the search engines yourself. For
example, entering the query "site:<<repo url>>" in Google will show you the
number of repository pages indexed. By doing this every month or week, you
can keep track on how the exposure of your repository grows. Handy tools,
such as the SEO Quake <http://www.seoquake.com/> browser add-on help you to
automate this process.
The repository ranking totally disregards repository usage (pageviews,
downloads), simply because those data are not easily accessible for the
people at the Cybermetrics Lab. However, tools like Google
Analytics<http://analytics.google.com/>or the internal DSpace
SOLR statistics <http://bit.ly/bXCyFb> enable you to keep track of your
repository usage.
* Learning from the repository ranking *
When internal metrics are the primary tools, already offering a wide range
of options to track your repository's progress on certain metrics, why
bother with the ranking ? Although there are a few pitfalls, there is
definitely an opportunity to learn from successful repositories.
When comparing the ranking for your repository, to its previous ranking, you
could get strange results (e.g. very big jumps) because of changes in the
ranking algorithm. This was the case when comparing the rankings from
January vs July 2010 <http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=410508203767>.
However, for this edition, the Cybermetrics lab has assured that the ranking
algorithm wouldn't be tweaked compared to the July 2010 edition.
Although it's clear from the ranking
methodology<http://repositories.webometrics.info/methodology_rep.html>that
repositories with a thousands of items generally score higher than
very
poorly populated ones, having the highest number of pages is no automatic
ticket to the top. For example, although the University of Sao
Paulo<http://www.teses.usp.br/index.php?lang=en>has 26.166 items
indexed, it's placed higher than the Kyoto
University's KURENAI
repository<http://repository.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/dspace/browse-title>with
almost 100.000 items. The scores on four different indicators (size,
visibility, rich files, scholar) show on which of the areas a repository can
improve in order to improve its overall ranking.
*Including your repository in the Webometrics Repository Ranking*
If your repository hasn't been included in any of the previous rankings, it
won't necessarily mean that it didn't perform well enough to make the top
800, but could also indicate that the Cybermetrics lab is not aware of your
repository. *Send an email with your repository URL to
[email protected], well before the 1st of January, to ensure that
your URL gets included in the data collection phase*.
Only repositories with an autonomous web domain or subdomain are included:
repository.xxx.zz (YES)
www.xxx.zz/repository (NO)
Although it will take some technical work to change your URL while ensuring
proper redirects for your older URL's, it's definitely worth to go through
this trouble in getting an autonomous web domain or subdomain.
Those repositories consisting only of one or several electronic journals
(journal' portals), or devoted to non scientific papers or focusing in
archival material are excluded.
Apart from these basics, more best practices can be consulted
here<http://repositories.webometrics.info/best_practices.html>
.
We wish you the best of success in optimizing your repository for increasing
online exposure and hope to see an increasing number of DSpace installations
in the new top 800.
with kindest regards,
Bram Luyten
@mire - http://www.atmire.com
Technologielaan 9 - 3001 Heverlee - Belgium
533 2nd Street - Encinitas, CA 92024 - USA
http://www.togather.eu - Before getting together, get t...@ther
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