I have a general question for all of our PressbooksEDU network managers. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the interface we build and display for network managers, the tools and information we offer to help you administer your networks and understand more about the activity on them (both in terms of creating books and users on the authorial side and on the Google Analytics/visitor statistics side), and the initial training we offer. We’re planning to begin work shortly on some improvements to all of these components, and we are curious to hear from network managers about what you wish you could do or see.
I’m very interested in feedback from you on any of the following questions:
What do you wish you could do more easily as a network manager on your Pressbooks network?
What information would you most like to have about books and users on your network to help you understand activity and/or communicate value up to your funders/supervisors?
What information would you most like to have about visitors to or usage of published content on your network?
It would be nice to have a dashboard where I could quickly browse the books on our network. For example, it might have a preview of each book’s cover art (or, lacking cover art, the title), along with basic statistic information for each title. For example: BOOK All time stats: 1,223 downloads, 100,000 page views (based on landing page stats), 2 public clones (with links to cloned copies, if public). This would provide me with a quick overview of which of our books are getting the most use (and even reuse)!
The information I would like to have the most is download stats and part-by-part visit stats. Although it wouldn’t be very granular (I doubt we could get the number of unique visitors), having a ticker for unique visits to each page along with basic download stats would be excellent, especially if it was parsed out by date. (1,223 all time downloads, 1,000 downloads last month, 223 downloads this month, etc).
While I am not a big fan of data tracking that can reveal an individual’s identity, I do think that basic IP address could be useful to show where people are viewing or downloading a book (country, institutional affiliation, state). Other than that, the most useful information for my users (faculty with open textbook projects), would be “time spent on page” stats. On average, how long does a user spend on a particular chapter or part of a book. Is a certain chapter being read (or not)? Those stats would be useful for multiple reasons.
These are great requests! We don’t record most of what you’re asking for regarding visitor/usage statistics ourselves, but we do support network managers in seeing much of this using Google Analytics for their network, if they so desire. We have a brief chapter in our network manager guide that might be of interest.
You should be able to see most what you’re looking for with #2 and #3 there. For example, we recently added book titles to the download info we send to Google Analytics thanks to development support from eCampusOntario, for instance (thanks @lhogendoorn!).
Hopefully there are other network managers here that know more about using Google Analytics effectively that might be willing to share their knowledge/experiences, or failing that, that could be something that @mcgratay and I research and provide for folks like you in the future.
I’d like to Second what @SteelWagstaff mentioned about Google analytics. It’s been an integral tool in looking at Pressbooks engagement at UW-Madison in terms of where (geographically) and when (time of day and semester long trends), which books and chapters, and even how long users have spent on specific pages.
One thing which would be particularly helpful as a network manager would be information about which books are taking what amount of space on our instance. While we’re nowhere near the limit of storage usage which is available to us, it would still be very helpful to get a sense for which books are taking up the most space on our instance, and if there aren’t any other solutions on our campus which could help. I know that in the current network dashboard it says total usage for the instance, but having something analogous for each book in an easy to view space would be great!
I think the above falls into question 1 territory I’ll have to think more about the other two!
Hi Abbey, you’ve probably already seen it, but your network should now have more of what you were asking for (minus the usage stats, which are still separate and in Google Analytics) for #1 in the new book list tool we recently released. See https://networkmanagerguide.pressbooks.com/chapter/book-list/ for more details. Thank you for your recommendations!
I’ll have to think more about the other two!