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Thank you everyone for the great comments and discussion.  That's what I love about this list, out of all the professional lists I subscribe to, this one has to be the best.  Great discussions and members are always willing to help each other out.

The feedback you provided has given me many reasons to implement Analytics within our finding aids, supplementing the existing Analytics for our website.  We use Dreamweaver to work on our website, but I haven't used the global change feature before.  Thanks for the tip Sharon.  Also, this discussion definitely made me think more about finding aid usability in light of Google driven discovery.  I really like Joyce's idea for including an note explaining what a finding aid is.

One specific question:  How are you getting the Analytics code into your transformed finding aids?  Jennie mentioned that she uses an include footer (I assume this is PHP driven?).  Is anyone including the code in their stylesheet?  How about for places who use an XML database or homegrown system for finding aid searching?

Thanks,
Nathan

On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 2:01 PM, Nathan Tallman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Happy Tuesday Everyone,

Just wondering if anyone has tried using Google Analytics with their finding aids.  I was thinking it would be easy enough to insert the necessary code in the stylesheet template and then you'd would be able to get some good data on finding aid use, as well as user browser/network/hardware capabilities.  

When I started my current position, I implemented Analytics on several pages of our website.  Our public finding aids are all HTML at the moment and I didn't want to hand edit each individual document, so chose not to implement Analytics in finding aids for the time being.  We've recently started an EAD project thought and this idea came back to me.

If you have implemented Google Analytics for your finding aids, I'd love to hear about it!

Best,
Nathan