Being able to compare your usage with other institutions and repositories is a valuable aspect of IRUS. It helps give meaning to the numbers and puts your usage in the context of the wider open access landscape.
Both the Custom Platform Master Report and Custom Item Master Report allow you to select up to 5 institutions and their associated repositories. The institution lookup in the report selection makes it easy to find and view an institution's repositories.
These flexible reports can help you answer a wide range of questions such as:
- How does usage of a particular item type compare?
- What were the trends in usage for similar institutions or repositories?
- How does usage of our most downloaded items compare with that of other repositories?
The "Top Items" visualisation shows the most used items across all participating repositories, or a selection of repositories. You can then highlight items from a particular repository on the visualisation.
Further views and visualisations to enable comparison of repositories will be added as the service develops.
Things to consider when making comparisons with other institutions and repositories:
- Some institutions have separate repositories for types of content (e.g. theses or datasets)
- Not all repositories are yet able to send investigations and so these counts will be zero
- Data is available from the point a repository joins and so may have different start dates. This will therefore be reflected in the total usage shown within certain date ranges.