ezPAARSE and ezMESURE: Assembling dashboards on a national repository from fine-grained and locally generated usage statistics to electronic resources

Abstract

Generating fine-grained Access Events (AEs) to electronic resources from locally gathered log files through ezPAARSE begins to be a fairly well known process among colleagues having to manage a reverse-proxy to provide their patrons with authenticated access to their institution’s electronic resources’ subscriptions. Our objectives with this software are manifold: let our users gain control over the generation of usage statistics; homogenize the production of this strategic data; have more complete and granular data than those usually provided by publishers, to supplement them (including information on categories of users) or to compare them.

ezPAARSE has been implemented as free and open source software since the end of 2012 and now comes with a list of more than 200 community contributed parsers, providing its international user base with a good coverage of their electronic resources subscriptions. For the publishers or providers that are not recognized by ezPAARSE yet or simply need an update, it is easy to contribute an analysis on our community platform. This is were the different types of URLs are collected, semi-automatically analyzed and commented so the corresponding parser can be accurate. We reward this participation with a system of open badges.

Collecting ezPAARSE generated and enriched AEs into the ezMESURE french national repository for dynamic dashboard creation, consolidation and representations has been an sustained effort since the beginning of 2016 for INIST-CNRS, Couperin.org and its members. The repository now hosts access data for almost 60 institutions. Based on an ElasticSearch and Kibana stack, ezMESURE is able to store, retrieve and display all this data in a variety of dashboards that can be tweaked to every need while also paving the way for aggregated views. With this ecosystem, our users are provided with a complete processing chain, to finely analyze their data and get strategic elements for driving their subscription campaigns.