The fiscal year ended July 1 so it seems a good time to report some of the numbers we saw over the past year (July 1, 2009 – June 30, 2010). In no particular order:
- 1,604,862 – number of times the library’s home page was loaded.
- 29,914,095 – items served from main library website (pages, images, etc.)
- 2,855,193 – number of searches run against our OPAC via the web interface
- 13,665,355 – number of ‘pages’ served by our catalog during the year
- 93,013,174 – number of ‘hits’ on our off-campus authentication (proxy) server.
- 818,878 – number of items “viewed” in our MARS system.
- 90,401 – number of pdf files retrieved from our e-reserves system.
There are a few other stats I haven’t listed but if I were to add them to these numbers we’d end up with just over 142 million ‘hits’ on library servers during the past year.  An average of  4.5 hits per second.
Actually, that’s low-balling the number to some degree.
Not included are visits to e-journals and databases when the query is launched from a machine on the campus network (e.g., in the library or a faculty desktop or in a dorm room).  Those requests don’t go through our proxy server and are thus much more difficult to quantify.  We’re also skipping our InfoGuides service (hosted elseweb) and  not counting our various research portals in this set of numbers.  Finally,  we’re also neglecting to count the non-stop traffic that goes in and out of the university’s PeopleFinder every day (it may surprise some to learn that we’ve run that service on a library server since roughly 1994–when we first launched a website that eventually became the university’s official web presence (http://www.gmu.edu)).