The following terms are defined below:
| Collection Hierarchy | Collection Groups | Collections |
| SubCollections | Views | Visits |
| Main Pages | Browses | Titles and Items |
| Title Views | Item Views | Citation Views |
| Text Searches |
SOAS Digital Collections are organized by Collection Groups, which contain Collections and Collections contain Subcollections. This hierarchical organization allows for general searches and browses at the Collection Group level and for granular searches at the Collection level for optimum usability for multiple user needs.
In reading the statistics by Collection, hits and searches done from the SOAS Digital Collections main page and the SOAS Digital Collection Group pages are not within collections and so are not included in the Collection statistics.
Collection groups are aggregations of collections in SOAS Digital Collections. The Collection Groups simplify searching across multiple Collections simultaneously. Collection Groups also connect less tightly related materials to increase the likelihood for serendipity, where users may be searching for one topic and may easily stumble across something related and critically useful that they had not considered. Thus, Collection Groups are usually constructed topically.
As an aggregate, hits at the Collection Group level do not count toward any particular Collection and are not included in the Collection based statistics.
Collections are the main method for defining and collecting related materials and are the most familiar hierarchical structures for subject specialists, partners, and other internal users. A single Collection can exist in several Collection Groups, and a single Collection can have many subcollections.
A single item may be in several Collections, but one Collection is always selected as primary so all item hits will be within a single Collection.
The smallest collected unit is the Subcollection. A single item can belong to several Subcollections under the same collection, or to multiple Collections and to Subcollections within each Collection.
Because all Subcollection items will have a primary Collection, the usage statistics for Subcollections are also included in the Collection usage statistics.
The total views per item. This is equivalent to hits.
The number of unique visitors. This is always smaller than the number of views people a single visit will normally include multiple views.
Hits are the actual page hits. Each time a person goes to SOAS Digital Collections it counts as a hit. The SOAS Digital Collections statistics are cleaned so that hits from robots, which search engines use to index websites, are removed. If they were not removed, the hits on all collections and items would be much higher. Web usage statistics are always somewhat fallible, and this is one of the means for ensuring better quality usage statistics.
Some web statistics count "page item downloads" as hits, which is highly inaccurate because each page has multiple items on it. For instance, the digital library main page, SOAS Digital Collections, includes the page HTML and all of the images. If the statistics counted each "page item download" as a hit, each single hit to the main page would be counted as over 30 "page item downloads." To make matters more confusing, some digital repositories only offer PDF downloads for users to view items. Those digital repositories track "item downloads" and those are most equivalent to our statistics for usage by "item."
Each time a person goes to this digital library it counts as a hit, but that means a single user going to the site repeatedly can log a large number of hits. Sessions provide a better statistic for how many different "unique" users are using the site. Sessions include all hits from a particular IP address (the user's computer web address when connected) as recorded in the web log file within an hour.
This is also a fallible statistic since users' IP addresses are frequently reused on networks. Connecting to free wireless means that network gives your computer an IP address, and then when you disconnect that IP address will be given to the next user who needs it. For a campus based resource with so many on campus users connecting through the VPN or from on campus, the margin for error increases for session-based statistics.
For each of the elements in the Collection Hierarchy, the main pages are the home or landing pages, the search pages, the contact pages, and any other supplemental pages.
When users conduct a search through the Collection pages and view the results, those search result pages are also included in the main pages. Once a user clicks on one of the items in the search results, that item is not one of the main pages. The views for search results by thumbnail, table, and brief modes are all included in the main pages for the Collection.
For instance, the SOAS Digital Collections main pages are:
For the Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature, the main pages are:
The main dLOC pages include the versions of the main pages in English, Spanish, and French.
Browses include hits against standard browses, such as All Items and New Items (when available).
Search result hits includes every view of a section of search results, and includes searches which returned zero results.
Titles are for single bibliographic units, like a book or a newspaper. Items are the volumes within titles. Thus, one book may have one title and one item where one newspaper may have one title and thousands of items.
Titles with only one item (or volume) appear functionally equivalent to users. However for items like newspapers, a single title may correspond to thousands of items as it does for most of the titles in the Newspaper Collection.
Readers of the technical documentation and internal users know titles by their bibliographic identifier (BIBID) and items within each title by the BIBID plus the volume identifier (VID).
Title hits include all hits at the title level.
Item hits include hits at the item level only.
For each item, the default view is set to the page item (zoomable or static based on user selection and the availability of each of the views for that item). All items also include a "Citation View" that is not selected by default. The "Citation Views" counts the number of times a user chooses the "Citation View" for an item.
Text searches are item-level searches within the text of a single document. This returns the pages upon which the term or terms appear.
