Logging logins
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These slides were created for a lightning talk presentation for SCELCapalooza and ER&L in February 2015.
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Logging logins
- 1. Logging Logins ANALYZING EZPROXY LOGS AT NEVADA STATE COLLEGE
- 2. About NSC • Institution • Four-year, public • Established in 2002 • 3,000+ current enrollment • Diverse student population • Library • 18,000 print volumes • 170,000+ e-books • 3.5 librarians, 1 staff • 1 open position
- 3. EZProxy Logs Files containing usage data collected by the EZProxy authentication system
- 4. What is Tracked? Determined by the config.txt (EZProxy configuration) file LogFormat %h %l %u %t "%r" %s %b %a %{ezproxy-session}i %{ header}i %T LogFile -strftime ezp%Y%m.log
- 5. Research Questions o Is the library serving a diverse user group? o Does library use impact student success? o Are there differences in how students use our resources? o How many users do we have for a given resource?
- 6. Our Process Library Information & Technology Services Institutional Research Library o Line in EZProxy determines what is collected o A new text file is created every month Information & Technology Services (IT) o Custom log parser converts data into csv o CSV logs are sent weekly to IR Institutional Research (IR) o Library files are combined with student data o Tableau dashboard reports data in aggregate
- 11. Contact Information Tiffany LeMaistre Electronic Resources and Discovery Librarian Nevada State College Phone: 702-992-2907 E-mail: tiffany.lemaistre@nsc.edu
- 12. Learn More University of Minnesota
- 13. Sources for Getting Started Magnuson, Lauren, and Robin Camille Davis. “Analyzing EZProxy Logs.” ACRL TechConnect Blog. N.p., 29 Oct. 2014. Web. 17 Dec. 2014. http://acrl.ala.org/techconnect/?p=4684 JISC, and University of Huddersfield. “Library Impact Data Project.” N.p., n.d. Web. 7 Feb. 2015. https://library3.hud.ac.uk/blogs/lidp/ OCLC. “Log File Analysis.” OCLC Support and Training. N.p., 2015. Web. 13 Feb. 2015. http://www.oclc.org/support/services/ezproxy/documentation/loganalysis.en.html University of Minnesota Libraries. “Library Data and Student Success.” Library Data and Student Success. N.p., n.d. Web. 7 Feb. 2015. http://blog.lib.umn.edu/ldss/
- 14. Additional Sources Collins, Ellen, and Graham Stone. “Understanding Patterns of Library Use among Undergraduate Students from Different Disciplines.” Evidence Based Library and Information Practice 9.3 (2014): 51–67. Print. Cox, Brian, and Margie Jantti. “Capturing Business Intelligence Required for Targeted Marketing, Demonstrating Value, and Driving Process Improvement.” Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) - Papers (2012): n. pag. Web. http://ro.uow.edu.au/asdpapers/242 Cox, Brian, and Margie Jantti. “Discovering the Impact of Library Use and Student Performance.” Educause Review. N.p., 18 July 2012. Web. 26 Jan. 2015. http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/discovering-impact-library-use-and-student- performance Jantti, Margie, and Brian Cox. “Measuring the Value of Library Resources and Student Academic Performance through Relational Datasets.” Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) - Papers (2011): n. pag. Web. http://ro.uow.edu.au/asdpapers/121 Fransen, Jan. “How Do Engineering Students and Faculty Use Library Resources?” American Society for Engineering Education, 2013. conservancy.umn.edu. Web. 10 Feb. 2015. http://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/151819 JISC, and University of Huddersfield. “Library Impact Data Project.” N.p., n.d. Web. 7 Feb. 2015. https://library3.hud.ac.uk/blogs/lidp/ Nackerud, Shane et al. “Analyzing Demographics: Assessing Library Use Across the Institution.” (2013): n. pag. conservancy.umn.edu. Web. 9 Feb. 2015. http://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/143309
- 15. Additional Sources Nevada State College. “Nevada State College: Facts & Figures.” About Nevada State College. N.p., 2014. Web. 13 Feb. 2015. http://nsc.nevada.edu/2069.asp Soria, Krista, Jan Fransen, and Shane Nackerud. “Library Use and Undergraduate Student Outcomes: New Evidence for Students’ Retention and Academic Success.” portal 13.2 (2013): 147–164. Print. Stone, Graham, and Ellen Collins. “Library Usage and Demographic Characteristics of Undergraduate Students in a UK University.” Ed. J. Stephen Town. Performance Measurement and Metrics 14.1 (2013): 25–35. CrossRef. Web. 10 Feb. 2015. http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/14678041311316112 Stone, Graham, Bryony Ramsden, and Dave Pattern. Library Impact Data Project Toolkit. University of Huddersfield, 2011. Web. 12 Jan. 2015. http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/11571/1/Toolkit_final.pdf Stone, Graham, Bryony Ramsden, and Dave Pattern. “Looking for the Link Between Library Usage and Student Attainment.” Ariadne 67 (2011): n. pag. Web. 10 Feb. 2015. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue67/stone-et-al University of Minnesota Libraries. “Library Data and Student Success.” Library Data and Student Success. N.p., n.d. Web. 7 Feb. 2015. http://blog.lib.umn.edu/ldss/ Wong, Shun Han Rebekah, and T. D. Webb. “Uncovering Meaningful Correlation between Student Academic Performance and Library Material Usage.” College & Research Libraries 72.4 (2011): 361–370. crl.acrl.org. Web. 10 Feb. 2015. http://crl.acrl.org/content/72/4/361
Editor's Notes
- Hi, I’m Tiffany LeMaistre. I’m the Electronic Resources & Discovery Librarian at Nevada State College and I’m here to talk to you today about our library’s logging logins project to analyze our EZProxy logs.
- First some background. Nevada State College is the only 4-year, comprehensive public institution in Nevada. We are the fastest growing institution of higher education in the state. Over 50% of our students are from culturally diverse backgrounds and 51% are first generation college students. In the library we have a fairly small staff and a very small print collection, which is going almost entirely into closed stacks storage when we move into a brand new library this summer.
- So now that you know who we are, on to what we are doing. EZProxy is an authentication system commonly used by libraries to provide access to online databases, ebooks, and other resources. Many of you might think of EZProxy as the off-campus authentication system, but at NSC we actually use it to authenticate users on and off campus. EZProxy logs are files that EZProxy can be instructed to collect of usage data from this system.
- So what exactly does it track? This is a snapshot from less than 1 minute of log data on February 2nd. The 500 number you see partially obscured is my user id, and the activity is simply accessing an Ovid journal. What fields are tracked is determined by a simple two line entry that can be added to your EZProxy configuration file. Here on the left is what my line looks like. It tells EZProxy to track the accessing IP address, username, date and time of request, URL access, and a variety of other fields that measure things like processing time and data transferred.
- Our plan at NSC is to use that garble of data to answer these research questions. Is the library serving a diverse user group? I want to know if our users are representative of our campus based on demographic factors like race, ethnicity, age, and gender as well as academic disciplines and statuses. Does library use have an impact student success? Is there a correlation between students who use library resources and students who are retained, have higher GPAs, and graduate on time. Are there differences in how students use our resources? Such as differences in number of resources accessed or average time spent searching. And do those differences correlate significantly with different user groups or student success factors? How many users do we have for a given resource? Beyond just how many searches and sessions we had in a given database we can determine how many repeat or first time users and other factors about them. The above image is licensed under the public domain and was created by Tommy Lau of The Noun Project. http://thenounproject.com/term/question/27582/
- To answer most of these questions we need more than just proxy log data. We need to be able to combine that data with information about our students using the user id as a match point. At NSC that means a partnership with the IT department and Institutional Research. Kathryn Mulvey, from our IT department, wrote a custom code to parse our log file data from that garble of text into meaningful fields. She then created a process to pass it weekly to Institutional Research where Mick Haney and Sandip Thanki use SQL to interpret some of the more complex fields like the URL, combine the data with student data, and present it on the web in a Tableau dashboard.
- Tableau is a visualization software that allows you to publically share data on the web. This is a screenshot of our first draft with proxy log data from January. We’ll be working on it throughout the year, refining our data interpretation rules, adding additional information about our students, and inputting new log data monthly. If you want to look at it in more detail or follow our data as it develops it is publically available on the web at this URL.
- Currently each bar represents a date from our data set, and the height is determined by the number of unique students who accessed a resource on a given day.
- The colors represent different resources. Currently it’s fairly crude, for example the big pink sections are EBSCOhost, but there isn’t YET an indication of how much is Academic Search Premier vs. Business Source Complete.
- The graph is also dynamic. Using the dropdowns on the right hand side you can limit the data by ethnicity, gender, and academic level.
- So that’s what we have so far. If you are thinking about doing this or already doing this I would be glad to talk around the conference or you can contact me later.
- If you want to find out more about the process and the product of analyzing proxy logs these are some of the institutions with fairly prolific authors on the topic.
- And I’ve also split my sources into those I found most helpful for getting started with this work…
- And the rest which include a wealth of data from institutions that are already seeing meaningful correlations and actionable data.
- Thank you.