I’m still thinking through ways to understand the relative usage of the bX Recommender service in our instance of Primo VE (something I have already written about here and here). I’m not much of an expert in Alma analytics, but I am thinking that perhaps the basic dashboard we’ve set up there that counts clicks on most of the key features of the Primo VE interface might yield an interesting set of statistics that give some context to the usage data for bX Recommender (roughly 2000 clicks a year on recommended items). I am thinking that if I can understand whether the bX Recommender links are getting clicked more or less than all the other things one can click on in an item record for an article, that might be useful.
Probably the most comparable things in a record that a user can click on would be those elements that have a “more like this” or “more of this” functionality, such as clicks on:
- author names in the “Creator” section
- subject headings
- the citation trail features (sources that cite the source I’m looking at and sources that were cited in the source I’m looking at)
- the “next page” link on the search results pages
Then, I think it would also be useful to see how the 2000 bX Recommender clicks stack up against clicks on the links for some of more useful basic functions in an item record:
- facet filtering
- clicks on a database link or the “view online” link that takes you down to where the database links are shown
- show the record permalink
- email the record
- get a citation for the record
- export to various citation management services/file formats
- results sorting options (by relevance, by date-new, by date-old
Not sure how much this will help but it should deepen my understanding of what users are clicking on (and, more usefully, not clicking on).