What I’m up to? Access!

If I haven’t written much here lately it isn’t that I don’t have anything to say! No, I’ve just been very busy with the start of the fall semester, mostly with supporting our existing web services but also with the work we’ve been doing on a few new features that we hope to be rolling out shortly. Teaching and all the related prep is also taking up some of my time. But the biggest item on my project list at the moment is the Access 2012 conference.

Access is an annual conference focused on library systems and technologies, and this year I was lucky enough to be co-chairing this conference along with Amy Buckland. We, with a very large amount of help from our fellow organizers, have been working for most of the past year to make the conference happen. With the conference only a week and a bit away, lets just say that we are deep into the details and making sure that we’re ready to play hosts to the librarians and technology folks who will be coming to Montreal for a few days of learning, networking, and fun.

You can find more information on the conference web site. The conference is 100% sold out, but if the topic interests you, I encourage you to follow us on Twitter for an exciting announcement we’ll be making in the coming days.

I’ll share more on the conference, probably once it is over. For now, I’ve got to get back to my planning work!

Browser statistics: Comparing /library to the world

Start of a new month, which means that the browser stats are out for September. Given that September is the first month of the new academic year, I thought it would be interesting to compare the browser stats for the Library’s web site against the worldwide numbers to see what the differences are.

Here are the results:

September 2012
Browser Worldwide Market Share [source] Percentage of visits at mcgill.ca/library
Internet Explorer 54% 44%
Firefox 20% 22%
Chrome 19% 16%
Safari 5% 16%
Opera 2% 0.2%

The biggest difference is (remains, since this isn’t new) the much higher percentage of visitors to the Library’s site using Safari, equal to Chrome.

Another thing to keep in mind is that a good amount of the visits registered to the Library’s web site (I would conservatively put the number at 50%) come from students firing up a browser from a Library workstation, where the Library’s site is the default home page. These workstations are almost entirely Windows machines with IE and FF icons on the desktop. If we were able to remove this traffic from the above numbers, I am certain we would see that Safari has an even higher percentage than the basic report shows.

Luckily, we do already test on Safari! 🙂

How does this compare with the browser stats for your library?