The LibGuides Guide

Why assess usage?

At some point you will might need to know what your end users actually use on your guides. This could be used in an annual review or dossier. This could also be help you make decisions on what's working well on your guides next time you're updating and refreshing the content. From following these steps you might notice some valuable resources being under utilized, which could lead to making slight adjustments in the design of your guide or how you choose to describe the asset on the page.

How to track asset usage through clicks

The very first thing you'll need to have done for this to work, is to build your LibGuide using assets correctly! If you follow the directions on adding assets, you'll be able to track how many users click through to the resources you have shown. This process won't work if you've simply hyperlinked resources using the rich text editor or added an existing database manually.

To get to the page shown above:

1. Make sure you're on the LibGuides portion of iub.libapps.com
2. Click Statistics on the topmost banner
3. Just below the "Statistics" header are a list of tabs, starting with "Homepage" second from the right is Assets
4. Click Assets

To run an asset tracking report

1. Search for each asset separately by name
2. Decide on a daily or monthly break down
3. Usage statistics are time bound, so choose a start and end date
4. Run Report

Using a report

Here's what a report will look like

You'll notice three parts to a report

• Line graph visually representing usage trends over time
• metadata on the asset
• a usage table broken down by guide and page name
  • if assessing a popular database on a specific guide, sort by guide name and find the relevant row
  • if assessing more niche resources such as a book from a catalog type asset, this table will be much simpler with less scrolling