A Gentle Introduction to Urchin at ibiblio


ibiblio is transitioning to a new statistics package, Urchin, for your number needs.  The Urchin interface is slightly confusing; this page should help you use Urchin.

Note that these instructions are only for users with web addresses like http://www.ibiblio.org/somesite/  If your collection lives in a virtual host, like http://www.confluence.org/, you'll need to submit a stats request via http://www.ibiblio.org/help. After we set up a profile for you, you'll want to use a slightly different set of instructions than the below.

1) Log in

Urchin lives at https://stats.ibiblio.org/.  Go there, and log in with the username "guest" and password "ibiblio" (without quotation marks).   Then, click on the Log-in button.

login screen

2) Select a profile


Urchin stats are organized into profiles, so you'll need to select a profile.  You want to select "www.ibiblio.org.public" by clicking on the name itself.  When you click on the profile, a new window will open up with graphs.  The picture below shows exactly where to click:
Initial Urchin profile list

3) Begin drilldown

After you click on that link, a new window will pop up, containing something like the following image.  To get to your own stats, instead of looking at general ibiblio stats, you'll need to "drilldown" into your directory.  Begin by clicking on the "Pages & Files" option, highlighted with an arrow below.

Basic view of a single profile

4) Select drilldown

To get to the drill-down screen, you'll need to click "Pages & Files" and then "Directory Drilldown," highlighted below:

Drill-down example


5) The drilldown view

Next, click on "Directory by Pages Drilldown."  This will bring up a display like the one shown below:

Basic drill-down view


6) Filter categories

Unless your collection is inordinately popular, you'll probably have to filter the results to find it.  You can do this by typing in the first part of your URL directory in the box.  For example, if your URL was http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/, you'd want to put "/wm" in the Filter box and hit enter.

Drilldown view

7) Drill-down

To actually move into a directory of content, click on the folder icon next to it.  In the example below, I've moved several levels into the "/wm" directory, and now want to move into the "haywain" directory.  To do this, I click on the folder icon next to "/haywain."

This is where you will actually see the number of page views for each folder and page: here, http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/bosch/ got 11,707 hits, and all the content underneath it (things like http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/bosch/haywain/, http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/bosch/delight/, etc) got a total of 39,361 hits.

Also, this is where the date range comes into play.  Note that the date range is "07/01/2005 - 07/31/2005", from July 1 to July 31. 

drill-down example

8) Selecting alternate date ranges

To select a different date range, you can click on various things in the Date Range field in the bottom left corner of the screen.  The most general and most powerful way to change the dates used is to click on "Enter Range" and then select dates on the calendars presented.  After you've got the range entered, click on "Apply Date Range," and Urchin will update with what it has available.  Please be patient: generating this could require a lot of processing.


Enter Range example