Tuesday, March 23, 2010

BHL Tech Report

Chris Freeland tweeted about the presentation he gave to a recent BHL meeting, the slides for which are reproduced below:


It makes interesting viewing. From my own (highly biased) perspective slide 10 is especially interesting, in that BioStor, my tool for locating articles in BHL is the 8th largest source of traffic for BHL - 2.46% of visitors to BHL come via BioStor. By way of comparison, the largest single referrer for the same period is Tropics (11.14%), with EOL third at 6.45% and Wikipedia fourth at 5.56%. Obviously this is a small sample, but it is vaguely encouraging. It is nice to see Wikipedia being a significant source of links. EOL has dropped significantly from being the largest referrer (22.51%) in 2008-2009 to third (6.45%) for 2010 to date. In one sense this may reflect BHL achieving greater visibility independently of EOL. I also wonder whether it might reflect the unsatisfactory way EOL displays BHL results? If the BHL results were grouped (for example, by article), then I suspect they may provide more enticing links for EOL users to click on (especially, for example, if the articles were flagged by whether they included the original description of a taxon). It would be fun to know what EOL users actually do (e.g., what fraction of EOL visitors to a given page click on BHL links?).