authors: Alison Hitchens and Gail Sperling Presented at ELUNA Salt Lake City, 2012

1. Primo Reporting: using 3rd
party software to create Primo
reports & analyze Primo
statistics
Alison Hitchens & Gail Sperling
University of Waterloo
Presented by Alison Hitchens at
ELUNA 2012

2. Agenda
• Primo Reporting
• Cognos Software Suite
• Playing with the PowerPlay Cube
• Impromptu Reports
• Working with Ex Libris Support
• Google Analytics

3. Why metrics?
• How much is our system being used?
• How is our system being used?
– Challenge assumptions
– Information for testing
– Raise questions
– Justify decisions
• CAUTION: make sure you understand what the data is based
on!

4. Back Office Reports
There are out-of-
the-box reports
available in the
Primo Back
Office

5. Back Office Reports
• Interesting statistical reports such as the Click-
through statistics
– Can filter by institution, user group, source,
start/end dates
– Detailed results give you information on click type,
view, count, click-value, institution, user group
and on/off campus

6. Example BIRT report

7. Example BIRT report

8. Creating local reports
• The Primo Reporting Schema (RPT00) gives read-only access
via Oracle Views to:
– PNX-related information
– Search-related information
– User-related information and events
– System monitoring events
• You need to install the RPT00 schema on your Primo server
• You can incorporate locally created reports into the Back Office if
you use Eclipse BIRT Designer

9. Creating local reports
• At TUG we create our reports using Cognos
– Filter on view rather than institution
– Flexibility to choose filters on the fly
– Dynamic* reports not static reports
– We already have Cognos expertise
• We focused on two views:
– SEARCH_STATISTICS
– CLICK_EVENTS *reports that can be
dynamically manipulated

10. Content of the views
SEARCH_STATISTICS
• scope_name
• scope_type
• search_count
• average_results
• average_search_time
• source_view
• institution
• on_campus
• user_group
CLICK_EVENTS
• event_date
• event_type
• click_value
– refine, full display, help, GetIt,
add to e-shelf, add a review,
previous page
• click_count
• view
• institution
• on_campus
• user_group

11. Documentation
• “Primo Reporting Schema and User-Defined
Reports” (Primo Technical Guide, Chapter 14)
– How to install the RPT00 Schema
– How to install user-defined reports (if using BIRT)
– Description of each of the reporting views

12. COGNOS SOFTWARE
SUITE

13. Cognos Software Suite
• PowerPlay
– OLAP (online analytical processing) software for analysis
• PowerPlay Transformer
– The modeling tool used to define how a cube will look
• Impromptu Web Report
– A report authoring tool for detailed list reports

14. What is a PowerPlay Cube?
• the data to be used for statistical analysis by
PowerPlay is built into a PowerPlay Cube
• PowerPlay Cube data is static but can be built or
refreshed regularly as required
• when analyzing data the user is not affecting
response time on the database

15. Measures
• Measures are the numerical data to be analyzed
• For the Primo cube we used:
– “Primo Count” = CLICK_EVENTS
– “Facet Count” = CLICK_EVENTS with facet info
– “Search Count” = SEARCH_STATISTICS
– “DeepSearch” kept separate because of problem

16. Dimensions
• different ways to view the numerical data – when,
where, who, what
– e.g. date, Event Type, View, Institution
• can be hierarchical
– Multiple categories can be grouped together in a
“folder”

17. Slicing & Dicing Dimensions

18. Filtering in PowerPlay
• A filter narrows the focus of the report and does not have
to be included in one of the rows or columns
• A filter can be applied by
– Selecting a category in the dimension line
– Right-clicking on a category in the dimension viewer
and selecting the filter option
– Clicking on a hyperlink in a row/column category

19. Other Features of
PowerPlay
• Once a report has been designed it can be
saved and will refresh with updated
numbers after the cube has been rebuilt
• Measures can be used in rows or columns
• Graphs can be easily created
• Reports can be saved in .pdf .xls or .csv
formats

20. The Power of PowerPlay
• Statistics at user’s fingertips
• No need to ask the expert to “tweak” a report
• Web – no workstation installs or updates
• No impact on database and Primo response time
• Saved reports update automatically

21. Creating a PowerPlay model for
PRIMO
• Queries are run against the database views
– CLICK_EVENTS and SEARCH_STATISTICS
• Calculations are included in the queries to create the
necessary dimension hierarchy
• Facet counts are limited to the first facet of each type
– if multiple facet values are applied for the same facet type only
the first one will be applied

22. Example query against RPT00 to
create the event counts
Includes calculations, e.g. group into
weekday vs. weekend; e.g. change
University of Waterloo to WATERLOO
Primo totals =
Primo Count
+ Facet Count

23. Designing the cube
• Involves a lot of back and forth clarification
between requester (me!), developer (Gail) and
Ex Libris Support
• Cube is tested on our Cognos test server so
that we can check the model and make sure
we can combine dimensions in useful ways
with expected results

24. PLAYING WITH THE
POWERPLAY CUBE

25. Example PowerPlay reports
Basic searches by
year and day of
week
Searches by
institution in
fiscal year 2012

26. Video demo of Power Play
• (hopefully) we are going to switch to a video
demo to show the easy and interactive nature
of the PowerPlay cube
• The following slides duplicate many of the
steps in the video

27. PowerPlay: OPAC Primo
Default view of the cube with first
two dimensions displayed.

28. Clicked on 2012

29. Clicked on Add User Data

30. Replaced date column with UW Views

31. Suppressed zeros

32. Nested UW user groups

33. Playing with facets
• We created a separate measure for the facet
counts
• We created a separate dimension for each
facet
• This allows us to:
– Look at which facets are used in combinations
– Drill down to the specific facet values that users
are choosing

34. Facet combinations: resource & date
Resource
Date
Created individual dimensions for
each facet type to allow comparison

35. Facet drill-down:
LC Classification & UW User Group

36. IMPROMPTU
REPORTS

37. Impromptu list reports
• Staff request a report
– describe purpose of the report, list data elements, criteria
for filters, and sort order
• Developer creates the report and publishes it to
Cognos
• Staff can view the latest report or run the report
from the Web whenever they need it

38. Sample report: Primo tags list
(based on the PNX_TAGS view)
View the latest or choose
run to select different
options
This report has 2
filters:
• Starts with
• Status

39. Sample report: Primo tags list
At the moment we can link to
our OPAC to see the title; in
future we will link to Primo

40. WORKING WITH EX
LIBRIS SUPPORT

41. Finding Answers
• Shout out to Ping Gao at Ex Libris NA Support!
– When does the data update in RPT00?
• if using real-time online transaction processing then changes occur
once data is written to Oracle
– Clarified that the click-event for basic search and advanced
search is based on the searches on those tiles not the click
on the link to those tiles
– Clarified the correct click_event code for basic search
– Confirmed differences between GetIt!, GetItlink1 &
GetItlink2 (one is based on Primo 2; the others on Primo 3)

42. Finding Answers
• In the search_statistics view there is scope_type and scope_name,
neither of which indicate blended search
– Blended search is included in local
• Why are we seeing both ONLINE RESOURCES and
ONLINE_RESOURCE for the top-level facet?
– It was used briefly by one view. Ping tracked this down!
• What do X field mean???? e.g. Database, Network, Data…
– Gained information to filter out fields that are for Ex Libris
internal use only

43. Outstanding issues
• Click_event for recommendations
– Doesn’t match the number of times we click on the
recommendations tab or on a recommendation (SI 16384-307240)
• Click_event for DS
– is returning the number of results from the deep search rather than
counting how many searches the users have done (SI 16384-291077)
• None of the views store data for the pre-search filters
• None of the views store data on which tab is being used
• It would be nice to have more definitions in the documentation

44. GOOGLE
ANALYTICS

45. Why add Google Analytics?
• GA generates detailed statistics about visitors to a website
and it is free! (www.google.com/analytics)
• Can supplement the information from other sources
– But can’t be combined with other dimensions in Cognos
• If you make changes to your site you can profile the effects on
usage
– Aids troubleshooting
– Aids website optimization
• You can profile corresponding time periods, for example
Winter 2012 semester and Winter 2011 semester

46. Why add Google Analytics?
• Includes information such as:
– Visits, unique visitors, language, country, browser, operating
system, mobile device
– Where the traffic is coming from, e.g. direct, from the library’s
home page, from SFX
– Can do virtual page tracking to access information on sign in, my
account, tab use
*Requires JavaScript code on every web page that you want to
profile

47. Browser information
for Jan. 3-Apr. 27, 2012

48. Mobile devices
Jan. 3-Apr. 27, 2012

49. Use of remote tab

50. Comparing semesters

51. Thank you!
Questions?
• Gail Sperling
– Cognos questions
– gesperli@uwaterloo.ca
• Alison Hitchens
– Primo content questions
– ahitchen@uwaterloo.ca