>     ...Third, I am enclosing the statistics of ETDs (*all 1,550 in
>     Portuguese!!!*) visited by country, in the month of February. I
>     believe it is a lot more if compared to paper versions.
>


I just wanted to confirm that this is not an unusual situation.  I just
compiled our March ETD statistics - 25,244 total downloads for the
month.  As of today, we have 4969 ETDs with full text online.  Even
after excluding some obvious crawling behavior and ill-behaved search
engines, in March alone, 3855 (78%) of them were downloaded at least
once.  Below, I'm attaching a list of countries from which download
requests came, but it's basically, well, all of the ones that have any
Internet access at all (I'm sure there are exceptions, but when you get
downloads from Myanmar you can pretty much stop counting).

You have to believe that a large number of these downloads are casual
browsing - someone sees a title that may or may not be interesting,
downloads, and then deletes it.  But whatever remaining percentage of
"real" uses is still miles ahead of the use seen by any print
dissertation collection.

The moral of the story is that freely available electronic theses and
dissertations are found and read.  To an embarrassing extent, print
theses and dissertations are not.

Thomas Dowling
[log in to unmask]


OhioLINK ETD Downloads by Country/Top-Level Domain, March 2005

Top-Level Domain        Downloads
Commercial Sites (.com, .net, .biz)     7595
Educational Sites       3024
Government Sites        80
Military Sites  47
Organizations   82

Andorra         5
Argentina       27
Armenia         1
Australia       162
Austria         17
Belarus         3
Belgium         38
Bermuda         1
Bosnia and Herzegowina  3
Botswana        8
Brazil  58
Brunei Darussalam       1
Bulgaria        7
Canada  198
Chile   8
China   31
Colombia        13
Costa Rica      6
Croatia         9
Cuba    1
Cyprus  3
Czech Republic  15
Denmark         23
Dominican Republic      2
Egypt   27
Eritrea         2
Estonia         3
Fiji    6
Finland         26
France  132
Germany         127
Greece  89
Hong Kong       32
Hungary         28
Iceland         6
India   73
Indonesia       96
Iran    9
Ireland         15
Israel  28
Italy   85
Jamaica         1
Japan   54
Jordan  8
Kazakhstan      1
Kenya   2
Latvia  5
Lebanon         4
Lithuania       8
Malaysia        117
Malta   1
Mauritius       8
Mexico  71
Morocco         5
Myanmar         6
Namibia         1
Nepal   1
Netherlands     71
New Zealand     18
Nicaragua       24
Norway  24
Oman    4
Pakistan        42
Peru    8
Philippines     123
Poland  57
Portugal        42
Puerto Rico     1
Qatar   2
Romania         75
Russian Federation      40
Saudi Arabia    53
Singapore       130
Slovakia        7
Slovenia        15
South Africa    16
South Korea     22
Spain   50
Sweden  16
Switzerland     10
Syrian Arab Republic    2
Taiwan  53
Tanzania        3
Thailand        65
Trinidad and Tobago     5
Turkey  68
Ukraine         2
United Kingdom  436
United States   92
Uruguay         1
Venezuela       2
Viet Nam        1
Yugoslavia      5
Zimbabwe        7
arpa    19
gwy     1
host    1
int     1
local   1
name    1
swt     1
tld     1
unknown         11081