So, I’ve been doing an inventory of all the instructional “how-to” type pages (and slightly broader) on the UBC library‘s website and I came up with some rather interesting (in some cases, what I thought were staggering) statistics.
Of the 794 internal and external links:
- somewhat surprisingly, only 3% were 404/dead links
- 16% were duplicate links (meaning I had already inventoried the link at least once)
Of the 590 internal pages:
- 20% are in PDF format
- 4.6% are Videos (mostly outdated)
- 3% are PDF versions of a webpage
- 20% (a whooping 106 page) duplicate content of another page. For example, I found 12 different pages that talks about How to Cite something (in general, not different styles).
What I also found interesting were how out of date some of the pages were. The best example was a page that refers to “Information Navigator 2001”! (Disclaimer: I did an inventory based on following links from the Instructional pages, branch pages, and FAQ, so it does not include any delinked pages.)
It’s no secret that I’m part of a larger project to revamp the library website, and I think I just provided some pretty good hard data to justify it.