A Record-Breaking April for UC-eLinks

In the span of thirty days, UC-eLinks — University of California’s easy way to link from an article or book citation to the actual publication online — processed 900,000 OpenURLs.  What does that mean? That’s how many times someone clicked the orange UC-eLinks button from their campus catalog, Next Generation Melvyl Pilot, Google Scholar or from a database like PubMed in April 2010. A typical month’s usage is 600,000-700,000 (OpenURLs processed) during the academic year and slightly less during the summer months.

What caused this torrent of usage? Margery Tibbetts, technical manager for UC-eLinks explained that this year mid-term exams for campuses on quarters and final exams for campuses on semesters both fell in April. UC-eLinks weathered the storm beautifully, maintaining good response time and experiencing no downtime during that period.

Overall in 2010, UC-eLinks is having more consistently high usage days. Since January, we’ve seen 54 days reach over 30,000 clicks in a day.

Want to know more? You can find the Top 10 Places UC-eLinks links to and from posted quarterly on the CDL website or find out more about What UC-eLinks Does. Finally, here’s a slightly less technical definition of what an OpenURL is.