Web archives that collect/request analytics of harvested sites?

Are there any web archiving projects or web archives that also collect/request web analytics of the harvested sites as part of the collection?

Jefferson Bailey

digital-preservation
web-archiving
born-digital

Comments

anarchivist: What sort of analytics? Do you mean something comparable to Google Analytics, Piwik, etc.?
Jefferson Bailey: Yep. Google, Piwik, AWStats, that Adobe product that shall not be named. Was thinking of how we measure use of archival collections over time and how analytics offer a way of recording how web archives are used over time (pre- or post-capture). I realize the added difficulty of working with site managers/owners to get this info. Was just curious if anyone had thought or tried it? User/visit info seems like important contextual detail and something most managers/owners are already capturing, so not hard to get (or request, at least).

Answer by anarchivist

This is a rather unscientific investigation, but by examining the source of the web archives (namely the header frames of each), it appears that both the CDL Web Archiving Service and Archive-It both capture analytics. The Web Archiving Service uses Google Analytics, and Archive-It uses Piwik. It's worth noting that the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive doesn't appear to collect analytics (at least using a platform that depends on loading JavaScript, such as Google Analytics or Piwik).