Chris Wiley, John Calcagni, Gary Hunt, Curt McCracken, Sharon Johnson, Deb Jacobson, Beth Anderson, Rick Yoder, Andy Bray, Laura Estes, Elizabeth Bird, Thomas Vinson-Peng

Announcements

Partnering committee:  Gary sent an e-mail to Jim Edward regarding P2Rx and OECA centers sharing info, looks like we’ll need to work with them individually.  Will have a call with partnering committee, Jim Edward and Tracy Back.  Please send Gary and Jean a call

NPPR board:  Thomas Vinson-Peng is applying for the “at large” position on the board.

Web usage:  Gary Hunt, Rick, and Andy have all been looking at usage numbers on Topic Hubs and other products.  We’ll discuss some ramifications and possibilities.

Small Area Source NESHAPs:  NEWMOA is doing a boiler topic hub, Andy will do an update at Region 7 roundtable

GLRPPR’s roundtable will be August 25-26

Agenda (all times Central)

1:00     Roll call

1:05     Web report - Andy and Laura

1:15     Web usage – Gary; Andy, Jean

1:45     Combining Topic Hubs and Sector Resources

1:55     Announcements and wrap-up

We reviewed the web stats sent by Gary, and comments by Andy.  We discussed the fact that google placement is very important to get traffic to your Topic Hub but remember jargon – our titles or names may not match what people are looking for.  Gary suggests we need to look at the pages inside to see what is useful.  Thomas is interested to see how long people stick around.  It’s a bimodal function 50-85% are gone in 30 seconds, then look at who else is there.  There’s a second bubble – how long are they there?  You can also get a plot of how long people are there.  Twenty percent of users have no referrer.  Jean pointed out that many users will get frustrated and go to Google, so don’t forget to keep it high.  Usability shows that people don’t get to the references.  John says the industrial sectors are growing at the same rate (usage) as Topic Hubs.

Andy was trying to get a sense of how much the hubs were being used on his site verses other people’s sites.

Rick doesn’t know how to take action on this data.  Gary says it helps you prioritize your work.  Rick wonders if changing keywords would drive traffic.  Gary doesn’t say we necessarily flush it, perhaps remarket it.  Key phrases were mostly in “other.”  Thomas says you have to look at the whole picture, see a lot of activity after a conference.  Andy says one actionable item is how little the references are used on the Topic Hubs.  How do we change that?  How much is the actual collection getting lost in the noise? 

Is this useful information?  Is it something we all want to do?  Rick said not just for topic hubs.  Laura thinks comparing is the most useful way to look at data.  Gary said if you analyze the industrial sector resources page, hub page had 22K visitors, vendor library had 40K visitors.  Laura wonders if the topic hubs were revised so the collections start getting hit, how were that change the usage?  Traffic to RLIBY from 1998 to present.  Chris is wondering what decisions he would make if he owned these topic hubs.  He doesn’t know how to interpret the data.  Deb says only actionable item may be to track usage of all the topic hubs over a period of time.  John says three bins – once you have all the numbers from all the hubs, keep the most active up to date, look at bottom third, decide if they’re fixable or do we walk away.  Constantly look at site by making the lower ones up to the middle, make sure the top ones don’t drop off.  What is it that we’re not seeing happen?  Chris says what is the resource commitment to make this happen?  He supports this but when it comes down to actually doing it, gotta figure out if we have the resources to analyze this.  Web trends is useful for other things as well, not just topic hubs. 

Andy wonders if as a next step we get a few centers together to test it further.  Play around it to see what we might find out as we look across centers.  We might just document it and let the other centers decide if they want to do this or not.  Elizabeth says this data may help us as we survey or do usability surveys.  The numbers should be useful to us.  Thomas says one more thing is that we need to look at visits and linger time. 

Committee of centers that want to look at the numbers and see what we can learn, then report back to the whole group.  Each center has to do the numbers individually and then it would have to be added up.  Peaks needs instruction on how to get the topic hub information.  WRRC, NEWMOA, Zerowaste.

Looking at the topic hub sector resources page.  Thomas says 3-5 word description of what topic hubs references and additional resources are.  Include a link to see all references for a topic hub.  Rick says on the previous page shorten the narrative on the category page.  Curious how the additional resources will be coded.  Hard coded by p2rx.  Elizabeth agrees with reducing the amount of verbage, perhaps click on “more.”  Have “more resources (sector resources) take you directly to the sector resource page.  Could add a short piece of context.  Over time this piece would be hard to maintain.  Andy says there’s a lot of history and legacy to this but thinking back to usability testing in Seattle, why don’t we connect the sector resources invisibly to the user.

There’s nothing reasonable we can do to fix the legacy issue.  Go to reference links include a link to the library when shared among all centers.  Elizabeth thinks the new version is an improvement on the current version.

Addition of the essential links is an improvement.  Peaks questions the additional resources link.  Having a tough time with references verses additional resources.  Prefer documents.