Links To Telematics For Library Projects

In this review of Telematics For Library Project web sites Brian Kelly reports on the numbers of links to the project web sites.

Background

Exploit Interactive issue 4 included an article which describes ways to promote your project web site, and in particular, ways of getting your web site indexed [1].

If you follow the advice given in the article, how will you know if you have been successful? One solution is to systematically record the numbers of links to your web site. If, over a period of time, you notice that the numbers of links to your web site is growing, you can be confident that people are noticing your web site, and value it sufficiently to make links to it. If, on the other hand, the numer of links to your web site fails to grow, this may indicate problems with your web site or with your dissemination strategy. If you know you have problems, you will be in a position to do something about it.

Finding Out About Links To You

The web as originally designed provided one-way links. There was no way of finding out about links to your web site. However there are a number of ways in which you can obtain such information.

• Analysis of server logs: You can analyse your server logs. The "referer" field will provide information on the page a user was viewing when they followed a link to your web site.
• Analysis of search engine databases: Several of the large search engines allow you to find links to a web site.

In this article we use the second option.

Report

A survey of the number of links to Telematics For Libraries projects (as listed at [2]) was carried out on Friday, 7th April 2000.

Discussion

An article elsewhere in this issue of Exploit Interactive [3] reviews a number of performance indicators for web sites, and includes links to a web site as a possible indicator. The author has carried out an analysis of links to web sites within the UK Higher Education community and has reported the findings in the Ariadne web magazine [4].

As mentioned in the Ariadne article, the numbers of links provided by Alta Vista appear to fluctuate. This phenomena has been reported by others [5]. There may be several factors which affect document fluctuation; for example the fluctuations in AltaVista are apparently due to variations on the the load on AltaVista's server farm.

Questions as to the relevance and reliability of web-based link data have still no been resolved. The author welcomes comments on these questions.

References

1. Promoting Your Project Web Site, Brian Kelly, Exploit Interactive issue 4, January 2000
   URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue4/promotion/>
2. Telematics for Libraries - Projects
   URL: <http://www.cordis.lu/libraries/en/projects.html>
3. Performance Indicators For Web Sites, Brian Kelly, Exploit Interactive issue 5, April 2000
   URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue5/indicators/>
4. A Survey Of Links to UK University Web Sites, Brian Kelly, Ariadne issue 23
   URL: <http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue23/web-watch/>
5. Internet Search Engines: Fluctuations in Document Accessibility, Mettrop, W., Nieuwenhuysen, P., and Smulders, H. In Proceedings of Internet Librarian International 2000, 20-22 March 2000, London, UK. Edited by Carol Nixon and Jennifer Burmood, Information Today Inc, pp. 153-163

Author Details

Brian Kelly
UK Web Focus
UKOLN
University of Bath
Bath
England
BA2 7AY

URL: <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk>
Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk

Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus. He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath.

For citation purposes:
Brian Kelly, "Links To Telematics For Library Web Sites", Exploit Interactive, issue 5, April 2000
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue5/telematics-links/>

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