Automated PURL Referral Tool Released

  • Last Updated: December 31, 1969
  • Published: December 02, 2010

No longer do you have to wait for the PURL referral report to be published by the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) to get statistics on the traffic that your institution sends to the GPO PURL server. Using your Federal depository library number and GPO-issued internal password, go to http://purlreferrals.fdlp.gov and get PURL referral statistics aggregated in real time quickly and easily.

The PURL referral reporting tool introduces some exciting new features that should help libraries to retrieve the most accurate PURL referrals totals by hostname and/or IP address, but also provide specific information about the top 50 requested PURLs so you know exactly which PURLs your users are accessing the most.

Features of the new tool include:

  • The ability to perform up to 10 simultaneous searches by full or partial IP address or hostname. Totals are calculated from the first of each month through the previous day on a per month basis.
  • PURL referral totals per IP address and/or hostname along with an aggregate total for all queries. PURL referral totals link to detailed information related to the top 50 PURL referrals per query that displays:
  1. The PURL path.
  2. The target URL.
  3. The total requests for that individual PURL.
  4. A link that performs a search of the corresponding PURL in the Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP).
  • The ability to export various levels of reports in comma separated value (CSV) format.

In this release, the PURL referral reporting tool is limited to a twelve month dataset, starting with November 2010. After twelve months, the data is purged from the system so any customized reports should be exported prior to that time. GPO will provide the aggregate PURL referral report for each month in the FDLP Desktop's file repository for archival purposes.

Due to the large amount of data that is being analyzed, constraints are in place for the initial release of the tool. GPO is analyzing system performance and the size of the logs given the new traffic routing rules. The availability of older traffic data as well as the ability to expand search capabilities to date ranges may be incorporated into future releases. Potential future releases may also include the ability to determine per institution traffic for shared catalogs. After users have had a chance to use the tool, GPO will invite the community to provide suggestions for future enhancements.

Detailed information about the benefits of using PURLs on library Web sites, how to use the PURL referral reporting tool, and how to get the most accurate PURL referral statistics can be found at Linking to Federal Resources Using Persistent Uniform Resource Locators (PURLs).