Those of you have attended recent Prism Events will be aware that the designed for extensibility architecture of Prism enables the integration of optional external services in to the Prism interface to create an even better experience for those that use it.  Those benefits are not exclusive to the users of the Prism itself.  For instance we have been demonstrating how services such as Google Analytics can give you valuable information and feedback to the library about the use of their tenancy.

We recently started a trial with the London Borough of Southwark and The University of Bolton tenancies to assess how Google Analytics can be introduced to Prism.  The trial has only been running running for a short time, but already some interesting information is starting to be produced.

For instance, you wouldn’t have expected to find that a London public library catalogue would be of interest to people as far away as France, Portugal, Czech Republic, Brazil, and the Philippines.  Slightly more expected is the fact that students in Bolton are still interested in the library at midnight on a Monday evening.

One of the objectives of the trial is to identify any impacts upon the performance of the user interface by introducing calls to external services such as Google Analytics. Care was taken to ensure that the calls are made to the service only once the page had been fully loaded in the users’ browser.  It is still early in the trial, but it already clear, by the total lack of comments from library staff and users, that there is no noticeable impact from a user point of view.

It is planned for the trial to last a few months, so that we can assess the information and it’s use and work through issues such as the best way to manage Google account logins and the way they are associated tenancies.