Outgoing

Use of VIAF

We have been collecting Google Analytics for more than a year on VIAF, and it has been interesting tracking usage.  Over the last year we had over a million page-views from Web browsers (Google Analytics depends on Web browsers executing code we put on our pages to collect statistics).  VIAF's current activity is triple what it was a year ago and growing, so that number should rise.

However we are seeing much more activity from accesses that do not show up in VIAF's Google Analytics numbers.  Direct access to VIAF not from browsers is about 90% of the activity, well over a million searches per month.  About a million of those searches each month are the equivalent of a page-view.

It is not easy to completly understand the requests.  Some of it is clearly Web spiders harvesting pages, other activity looks like people trying to match all their names against VIAF.  Much of it could probably done in simpler ways, so if you are planning on throwing a few hundred thousand requests at VIAF, contact us.  We'd like to know how you are using VIAF and may be able to offer suggestions on how to do it.

Based on our load tests, we don't think we are getting close to our performance limits.  So far everyone seems to be acting quite responsibly (e.g. by sending us less than one search/second).

One of the things I was interested to see was how many requests are to VIAF's auto-suggest service.  We have about three auto-suggest requests for each browser-originated search, which seems reasonable and on the low side of what I would expect.

We are very pleased with these numbers.

--Th

Peak books

Are we close to 'peak books'?  You often hear about 'peak oil', the idea that at some point soon the world will extract less oil from the earth each year.  How about books?

Here are some measures of library activity that may have already passed their peak:

• Gate counts at academic libraries
• Physical books circulated
• Public library patrons
• Budgets for physical material
• Catalogers employed
• Physical distribution of government materials to libraries
• Title selection by librarians

Some that probably haven't, but may soon reach their peak:

• Public library patrons
• Physical book purchases by libraries
• Books printed
• Total library budgets
• Physical books/volumes stored on campus
• Physical interlibrary loan
• Reference librarians
• Librarians in general

And some that seem nowhere close to peaking:

• Accesses to material (including electronic)
• Amount of licensed material available
• Physical books/volumes in off-campus storage
• Books published

Libraries have always complained about inadequate/shrinking budgets (e.g. academic library budgets are a shrinking proportion of schools' budgets), but the huge growth in higher education has offset that for total library budgets, but I doubt if that will be true in the future.

These are just my guesses, and I'd love to be wrong about most of them.  What should be moved to the 'nowhere close to peaking' section?  What am I missing?

Thanks to Eric Childress for discussion and suggestions.

--Th

I admit a North American bias in thinking about this, but maybe it isn't so different in Europe?