Showing posts with label website. Show all posts
Showing posts with label website. Show all posts
Tracking people who use the Library's book list blog posts
Someone asked me recently, "Can tell if people who look at the book list blog posts actually click on the books and borrow them?" A good question, and as I looked into it I thought it might be interesting to share some insights. Spoilers: the answer is yes... and no!
Shire Kids Festival Promotion on the Library Website
Whenever the library attempts something a little different or tries a new type of promotion or event I think it is important to review what we did and try to determine what impact it had. When it involves the website I always find it interesting to try and evaluate firstly, whether the promotion had any effect on the usage of the website, and secondly, whether the promoting something on the website contributed positively to the activity.
Impact of Website Home Page Promotion on Email Signups
I was wondering about the effectiveness of the main promotion feature on the home page of the Library website so I started digging in to the data to find out.
Promoting Encyclopedia Britannica on the Library Website
A couple of months ago I was asked about moving the Encyclopedia Britannica (and Britannica Image Quest) pages on the library website from their current location under Digital Collections to the Kids and Parents section. The thinking was that staff in the Children's section were often recommending Britannica as a resource for school homework and assignments and in this context it might get more use if people could find it under Kids and Parents.
My initial thoughts were that Britannica's location in the site would not impact use greatly, providing it was in a reasonably logical location. But you can never be sure and I thought it would be a good opportunity to test my assumptions.
My initial thoughts were that Britannica's location in the site would not impact use greatly, providing it was in a reasonably logical location. But you can never be sure and I thought it would be a good opportunity to test my assumptions.
Digital Library Services - 2013/14 Report
The key achievement in the last 12 months was the introduction of a redesigned library website. The new website was launched in early 2014; the goal being an improved user experience for visitors using mobile devices. The site is now fully responsive, with a design that flexibly accommodates the different screen sizes of smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktop computers. In conjunction with a new mobile view of the library catalogue access to the library's digital services is greatly improved.
The increase in digital usage has not, however, fully accounted for the drop in physical loans. Overall, usage of all the library's materials and resources has dropped 2% from 1,763,170 to 1,724,690.
The most popular digital services remain Overdrive audiobooks & ebooks, Freegal music downloads and Zinio digital magazines with these 3 services representing nearly three quarters (72%) of all digital usage.
Website Performance
All the key measures of the library website performance have remained fairly steady, improving only slightly. The number of visits (1%), the number of pages viewed (2%) and the number of visitors (7%) have all increased, which is a pleasing result. |
| Website use is fairly stable, however, all key website metrics are moving in the right direction. |
Mobile Traffic to the Website
Traffic from mobile devices continues to increase substantially with mobile phones up 40% and tablets up 83%. This has come at the expense of traffic from laptops/desktops which is down 12%. This confirms the importance of the work done to redesign the library website. |
| Comparison of mobile traffic. Phone traffic is shown in orange, tablet traffic in green and desktop/laptop traffic in blue |
Physical vs Digital Usage
Usage of digital resources has continued to grow substantially. The total use of digital resources has increased by 49% compared with the previous year. As a proportion of total use of library materials, digital use has grown by 2% from 4.05% in 2012/13 to 6.05% in 2013-14, reaching a high of nearly 7% in March. | |
| Digital use has increased by 49% compared with last year |
The increase in digital usage has not, however, fully accounted for the drop in physical loans. Overall, usage of all the library's materials and resources has dropped 2% from 1,763,170 to 1,724,690.
 |
| Digital use has increased as a proportion of total usage from 4% to 6%. However, the increase in digital use hasn't accounted for the full drop in physical loans |
The most popular digital services remain Overdrive audiobooks & ebooks, Freegal music downloads and Zinio digital magazines with these 3 services representing nearly three quarters (72%) of all digital usage.
 |
| Proportion of total digital use for different digital resources |
On the value of brochures & flyers for digital resources
It's that time of year again. We are preparing the annual performance report for council and I'm delving into the website analytics, looking at whether some of the things we are trying to achieve are backed up by the data.
Website Update
I just thought I'd give you a quick update on the new website. The idea behind it is to keep it simple so that it's easy for the public to navigate. For that reason, there are a lot of pages that have been taken away. While some of these pages may have seemed like a good idea, Google Analytics tells us our users think otherwise.
The Readers Guides are one of these subtractions. While staff found them helpful, stats showed they were really only being looked at a few times a month, so they got the axe. The good news is that we are revamping CheckMeOut.blog and I'm thinking the Readers Guides would look great on there.
The Website page has also been modified. Each link on this page now leads the user directly to Delicious rather than another page. This can help the user narrow their search e.g. if they are looking for information on the Aboriginal Referendum they might click on Aboriginal Australians from the website then click on 'Aboriginal_referendum' as a 'related tag' in Delicious.
Staff Resources no longer appear on the website but you'll find most of what you need in Compass - Library Unit Portal. We're still working on adding database passwords here, but will let you know when its been updated.
That being said, here's some additions to the website that you might find useful. These have been added based on customer/staff feedback:
Learn A Language page has been created to house Mango Languages and the upcoming IELTS language learning database. While these will also appear under the Online Databases page it was felt that they were worthy of their own page as language learning isn't really a research database.
An Historical Studies page has been created with links to the Shire Studies documents. A day after this page was created I had a query about one of these documents - just in time. Thanks Jacinta for adding them.
The Audiobooks and E-books page has been updated to include a list of all our E-books: Overdrive, Gale, Infobase and World Book.
There is now a Library Catalogue page under 'Online Collections'. Feedback has suggested that people don't always see the catalogue in the middle of Home Page so now it's in two places.
The Flickr page now has our Library's Photostream on it. It's mesmerising - especially when you get to the Wicked Wounds Workshop photos.
The events calendar page now has a link back to the Storytime and Rhymetime pages so that Patrons can find out times and dates of these sessions without me adding each individual session to the events calendar (there are about 19 in total).
Very brief details about parking have been added to the 'Find a Library' pages, after a Patron requested it.
There is now a page detailing photocopy and fax services - added based on customer feedback.
Well, right now that's all I can think of that's been changed. There's a lot more ideas in the pipeline so I'll keep you all updated
Enjoy browsing the website.
The Readers Guides are one of these subtractions. While staff found them helpful, stats showed they were really only being looked at a few times a month, so they got the axe. The good news is that we are revamping CheckMeOut.blog and I'm thinking the Readers Guides would look great on there.
The Website page has also been modified. Each link on this page now leads the user directly to Delicious rather than another page. This can help the user narrow their search e.g. if they are looking for information on the Aboriginal Referendum they might click on Aboriginal Australians from the website then click on 'Aboriginal_referendum' as a 'related tag' in Delicious.
Staff Resources no longer appear on the website but you'll find most of what you need in Compass - Library Unit Portal. We're still working on adding database passwords here, but will let you know when its been updated.
That being said, here's some additions to the website that you might find useful. These have been added based on customer/staff feedback:
Learn A Language page has been created to house Mango Languages and the upcoming IELTS language learning database. While these will also appear under the Online Databases page it was felt that they were worthy of their own page as language learning isn't really a research database.
An Historical Studies page has been created with links to the Shire Studies documents. A day after this page was created I had a query about one of these documents - just in time. Thanks Jacinta for adding them.
The Audiobooks and E-books page has been updated to include a list of all our E-books: Overdrive, Gale, Infobase and World Book.
There is now a Library Catalogue page under 'Online Collections'. Feedback has suggested that people don't always see the catalogue in the middle of Home Page so now it's in two places.
The Flickr page now has our Library's Photostream on it. It's mesmerising - especially when you get to the Wicked Wounds Workshop photos.
The events calendar page now has a link back to the Storytime and Rhymetime pages so that Patrons can find out times and dates of these sessions without me adding each individual session to the events calendar (there are about 19 in total).
Very brief details about parking have been added to the 'Find a Library' pages, after a Patron requested it.
There is now a page detailing photocopy and fax services - added based on customer feedback.
Well, right now that's all I can think of that's been changed. There's a lot more ideas in the pipeline so I'll keep you all updated
Enjoy browsing the website.
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