This toolbox is primarily intended for institutional repository managers and technical developers who wish to participate in IRUS-UK.
The toolbox offers a number of resources which should help you to:
COUNTER provides a set of international, extendible Codes of Practice that allow the usage of online information products and services to be measured in a credible, consistent and compatible way using vendor generated data.
The current Codes of Practice are:
For further information see the COUNTER web site.
The IRUS-UK widget enables IRUS-UK COUNTER-conformant statistics to be embedded into institutional repository pages. This user requested development offers greater flexibility to access and use IRUS-UK statistics.
For further information see the IRUS Widget page.
The IRUS-UK Code of Practice for recording and reporting Institutional Repository usage at the individual item level has been established as an outcome of the Jisc-funded IRUS-UK (Institutional Repository Usage Statistics - United Kingdom) service. It defines the technical, organisational and economic models for the recording, reporting and consolidation of usage of all item types hosted by participating UK Institutional Repositories.
It is consistent with and supplements Release 4 of the COUNTER Code of Practice for e-Resources and Release 1 of the COUNTER Code of Practice for Articles and has been developed in consultation with COUNTER. IRUS-UK is responsible for its ongoing management and implementation.
The IRUS-UK CoP provides the specifications and tools that will allow UK Institutional Repositories (IRs) to participate in IRUS-UK and thus record and report usage statistics at the individual item level that are credible, compatible and consistent. It also provides guidelines for data processing by IRUS-UK and auditing protocols. Institutional repositories participating in IRUS-UK will be considered to be COUNTER/IRUS-UK conformant.
Download the IRUS-UK CoP: PDF
The IRUS-UK service provides a single gateway for institutions to access statistics relating to usage events recorded within their institutional repositories (IRs). In particular, it contains COUNTER-conformant usage statistics for each participating UK higher education institution's IR.
The SLA includes the specification of the service, including its features and reports; agreed service level details and performance indicators; and reporting methods.
Download the IRUS-UK SLA: PDF
The IRUS Takedown Policy applies to the rare occasions when an item in a participating institutional repository has been uploaded in error or has been deemed to be commercially or otherwise sensitive and the repository itself has received a takedown request for that item.
Takedown requests to IRUS must be made by a designated repository manager/administrator.
Download the IRUS Takedown Policy: PDF
Takedown Process
If you wish us to implement this process for an item in your repository, please contact our helpdesk help@jisc.ac.uk adding IRUS in the subject field.
The 'Notice and Takedown' procedure is then invoked as follows:
Item identifiers play an important role in allowing IRUS-UK to produce accurate statistics and to interoperate with other services. We have produced a brief document outlining our recommended methods of cataloguing several key identifiers and how they should be exposed in repository OAI interfaces.
Download the IRUS-UK Best Practices document: PDF
Adding Tracker functionality to repository software enables repositories to transmit usage data to IRUS-UK for processing into COUNTER-conformant statistics
We have Tracker patches, developed by @mire, for the three most recent versions of DSpace. To be able to install a patch, you will need the following prerequisites:
The patches are available at https://github.com/atmire/IRUS
There is an Eprints Tracker plug-in, developed by Eprints Services, for Eprints 3.2.x and 3.3.x. It is available from the Eprints Bazaar: PIRUS/IRUS-UK PUSH Implementation
It's possible to add Tracker functionality to Equella. For more information please contact us at help@jisc.ac.uk.
Tracker functionality is available out-of-the-box as part of the Figshare codebase.
A plugin is available for the Haplo open source repository to provide integration with IRUS-UK, which can be downloaded from Github. Installing this plugin will enable tracking requests for items downloaded from the public interface to the repository to be sent to IRUS-UK for processing into COUNTER-conformant statistics.
For more information please get in touch at hello@haplo.com
Tracker functionality is available out-of-the-box as part of the Worktribe codebase.
There is a Ruby gem to provide integration with IRUS available on Github (mlibrary/irus_analytics). This latest version of the gem was developed by the University of Michigan. It can be used with Samvera (originally known as Hydra) applications, but it can as easily be used with a standard rails application.
Elsevier have added IRUS-UK Tracker functionality to their Pure Portal platform. If you have version 5.6.3 or greater you should be able to enable IRUS functionality without too much difficulty.
There are two scheduled tasks (available via the Pure admin pages) which will need to be configured to run nightly in this order:
If you run a Pure Portal and would like to participate in IRUS-UK please contact us at help@jisc.ac.uk for further information.
IRUS-UK excludes robots and rogue usage from usage statistics, by using:
See our position statement on the treatment of robots and unusual usage.
As part of the IRUS-UK project, we have examined a number of standards that have been proposed for the use of item types in institutional repositories, together with the item types that are actually being used. We have identified a number of issues affecting any attempts to standardise item types across UK repositories and have proposed an initial listing of item types for use in IRUS-UK. This is a pragmatic solution for the immediate future and can be extended as the project progresses as the original item types for each download are being stored and can be remapped at any stage.
Download the report: PDF
The IRUS-UK SUSHI-Lite (Beta) API is now available for trial use. To see how it works, have a look at:
Project Honey Pot is a free, distributed, web-based, open source system for identifying the IP addresses of spammers and spambots. IRUS-UK is participating in Project Honey Pot and has contributed to the project by identifying a previously unknown email harvester. We recommend that our users also participate. Further information can be found on the Project website (http://www.projecthoneypot.org/index.php).
If you are a UK repository wishing to participate in IRUS-UK, please contact help@jisc.ac.uk.
