Brian Kelly considers this approach. Background University web managers are busy people. University departments seem to have never-ending requirements for new services on the institutional web site. But, as we all know, it can be difficult to get the funding to buy expensive software products or extra staff to install and support free software. Nowadays the Web provides not only access to information resources , but also to applications .
Most people are interested in web statistics.
The statistics may be needed to justify the expense of the service, to monitor where the visitors are coming from, to investigate how the web site is being used or to detect broken links or other problems with the web site. But it can be difficult to provide access to web statistics to a range of information providers. The software must be purchased - although software such as Analog is freely available, there is a cost associated with software which provides richer functionality. Once the software has been purchased and installed, effort must be spend in configuring the web server and managing the log files. Although this can, and should, be automated, it may be difficult to allow, say, departmental information providers to carry out data mining of their data.