Webometric analysis of 181 national libraries' websites has been conducted in the context of this research. A Global Rank of 136 national libraries' websites has been organized. Their key traffic metrics have been analyzed and the Internet segments where they could be found have been identified. The analysis of websites' traffic channels that are direct, referral, search traffic, social media traffic, mailing lists and banner advertising traffic has been performed. The conclusion has been made about the successful integration of library content into the web environment, the gradual development of the web reputation and trust rank of the websites of particular libraries. The emphasis has been made on the possible use of the data obtained to develop approaches and algorithms for optimization, security improvement and efficient resource functioning of libraries that are multiservice social communication institutions with high access.
Digitization of library resources traces roots back to integration of library and information environment into digital media environment and updating the library's resource base. However, in different countries these processes do not coincide in terms of implementation and are associated with a nationwide hierarchy of values, recognition of the library social status in praсtice. Not only the country's attitude towards digitization at the first stage of informatization, its ability to create and implement the informatization concepts, social integration, intellectualization of the society, but the effectiveness of implementation of the national library and information science policy have the impact on the digitization of library resources. The research results of webometric analysis of the national libraries' websites of the world countries that differ in the level of socio-economic and technical-technological development and the state of Library and Information Science development present the main tendencies of digitization of library resources. 2
Theoretical foundation of libraries' future development in digital realities are present in numerous scientific works of Library and Information Science researchers and practitioners: O. Voskoboinikova-Guzeva, T. Granchak, I. Davydova, V. Ilganaeva, O. Kobelev, V. Kopaneva, K. Lobuzina, A. Peleshchyshyn, O. Mastykash, A.Solianyk, D.Solovianenko, G. Shemaeva and others. At the same time, research on the functioning of libraries' web-based resources raises a considerable amount of questions that are related not only to creation of the websites but also their optimization. In particular, relevant scientific works of A. Strungar, V. Strungar, S. Nazarovets and others are of great current interest.
The present research complements the previously conducted analysis on the current state of library web content accessibility based on the principles of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (2008) and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1. (2018) [3]. The scope of which was to check 177 websites of national libraries from around the world for compliance with WCAG 2.0 guidelines. 151 websites have been successfully checked with the use of Achecker service. 29 websites (19%) were fully compliant, 3 websites were partially compliant, and 119 websites did not meet WCAG 2.0 accessibility guidelines at A, AA and AAA levels [3]. 3
SimilarWeb (www.similarweb.com) has been chosen as the analytical tool for researching 181 national libraries' websites. SimilarWeb functionality makes it possible to analyze and compare key metrics of library website traffic, monthly traffic, pages per visit and visit duration. SimilarWeb allows to place traffic channels in the context of direct, referral and search traffic, to estimate social media traffic, mailing lists and banner advertising traffic and to establish links of library's websites to their partners and similar resources.
The result of the research is the relative rank of 136 national libraries' websites. It should be pointed out that among the 181 analyzed websites, the libraries whose global rank was not possible to identify by Similarweb portal (though other indicators of their functionality were obtained) were not included into this rating. In particular, these are the websites of National Libraries of Malta, Mexico, Ecuador, Botswana, Puerto Rico. In addition, the metrics of 35 websites were not obtained as they were located in the domain of other institutions (government organizations, corporate digital libraries) or the resources were irrelevant at the time of the research.
Webometric analysis of the websites made it possible to organize a Global Rank of 136 national libraries' websites (Table 1). Comparison of the obtained data on search traffic allows to claim that the digital library archives that hold the leading positions are the archives of the countries that have already entered the information society and actively use its multidimensional evolution of knowledge paradigm, as well as recognize the growing role of information, knowledge and digital infrastructure in all spheres of society functioning. The results of the analysis confirm the consistent pattern of permanent use of Library and Information Science digital resource bases in the countries that have the standard pattern of those bases. In particular, this is verified by the popularity rate of national libraries' websites of the following countries: the USA, France, Japan, Australia, Taiwan, Italy, Great Britain, Luxembourg etc.
The Library of Congress The Vatican Apostolic Library
The National Library of Luxembourg The National and University Library (Slovenia)
The National Library Service of Italy Library and Archives Canada The National Széchényi Library The National Library of Austral- 25097 ia
Rank 8167 10188 12000 15974 20809 20839 26355 26872 30868 32105 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 (Hungary)
land The Royal Library (Denmark) The National Library of Norway 51560 44307 46770 53591 53831 53948 70362 70953 72636 96660 97529 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28
The National Library of Korea The Swiss National Library (Switzerland) The National Library of Singapore The National Parliamentary Library of Georgia The Biblioteca Nacional de España (Spain) The National Library of Israel
erlands National Library of Sweden The German National Library 106760 92
1533262 1542319 1612751 1756175 2224001 2237681 2458441 2458441 2637033 2783848 2882525
ladesh
The Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine The National Library of Ireland 162699 99 162620 98
tenstein The National Library of Greece 172516 100 The National Library of Uganda 4030583 Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale (Italy) 182790 101 The Louis Notari Library (Mon- 4120639 aco) The National and University Library in Zagreb (Croatia) 186776 102
"St. Kliment of Ohrid" (Macedonia) The National Library of Iran 190175 103 The Bermuda National Library The National Library of Serbia 191741 104 The National Library of Aruba The National Library of Turkey 195722 105 The Bahamas National Library 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 46 3352621 3879945 4166311 4245981 4282063 4297577 4597552 5351877 6130518 6554712 6591602 7136176 8032099
The Royal Library of Belgium
nia The Mariano Moreno National Library of the Argentine Republic The Biblioteca Nacional de Panamá (Panamá) 412137 117 The National Library of Côte
d'Ivoire 412872 118 The National Library of Malay
sia 428626 119 The Cyprus Library (the Repub- 9284892
lic of Cyprus) 439308 120 The National Library of Senegal 10478622 457589 121 The National Library of the
Republic of the Maldives 459768 122 The National Library Service of
Belize 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 9014738 9209345 10880143 11162655 11456743 12178957 13695330 13703287 14710077 24556885 26331466 26895919 31996495 36834232 66 67 68
The metrics of 121 out of 181 national libraries' websites show that they could be found in different Internet segments (Similarweb lists 25 categories and 125 subcategories). The biggest number of national libraries' websites are in the «Libraries and Museums» category. For instance, The Bibliothèque Nationale de France (the National Library of France) is on the 9th position in the Top Websites Ranking (50 websites are in this category), The National Diet Library (the National Library of Japan) is on the 20th position, The British Library (the National Library of Great Britain) is on the 30th position, The National Central Library (the National Library of Taiwan) is on the 38th position, the National Library of Canada (Quebec) - 43d position, the National Library of Norway - 49th. These are the other Internet segments where library resources could be found: «Government», «Law and Government», «Arts and Entertainment», «Education», «Business and Industry», «People and Society», «Community and Society», «Universities and Colleges», «Marketing and Advertising», «Programming», «Internet and Telecom», «Archives», «News and Media», «Dictionaries and Encyclopedias», «Folklore» and even «Sports» (Fig.1.). The website of the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine is the only national library resource that is in the Books and Literature segment. Other criteria for ranking the national libraries' websites are the following: Traffic by countries; Average Visit Duration; Pages per Visit; Bounce Rate. National libraries' websites with the highest traffic metrics are listed in Table 2. The website of the National Library of China with a daily visit duration of 00:00:29 hours and 2.22 pages per user has the lowest traffic. For comparison, the average time spent on a website of a national library is 00:03:12 hours, the average pages per visit is 3.9 pages per user. These figures show the room for growth for the website of the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine, which visit duration is currently 00:1:17 hours and average pages per visit is 1.62 pages per user.
The lowest Bounce Rate - the percentage of visitors who leave the website immediately after visiting it or view no more than one page of it – have the following websites: the National Library of Denmark – 25.74%, the National Library of Canada (Quebec) – 29.40%, the National Library of Norway – 31.83%, the National Library of Scotland – 34.81%, the National Library of Austria – 33.26%, the National Library of South Korea – 33.95%, the Royal Library of the Netherlands – 35.52%. The highest Bounce Rate figures have been found on the websites of: the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine – 80.37%, the National Parliamentary Library of Georgia – 69.82%, the National Library of Azerbaijan – 69.27%, the National Library of Italy (Florence) – 68.80%, the National Library of Croatia – 68, 21%, the National Library of Japan – 65,43%.
Analysis of the traffic channels of the national libraries' websites has revealed that the majority of visitors come from the search engine websites – the average number is 35%, while the direct domain number is 22.7% and the referrals number is 15.7%. The research results allow us to determine that most of the users visit the websites of the national libraries from the following resources: Wikipedia.org, Wiki, web search engine Google.com, WorldCat.org directory, ЕBSCO.com portal, digital libraries, elearning Moodle platform and a variety of blogging platforms. In particular, the largest number of the national libraries' website visits is from Wikipedia.org. The above mentioned is supported by the figures of 66 websites' traffic out of 181. 26 websites of national libraries, including the Library of Congress, the National Libraries of France, Japan, Australia, Taiwan, Great Britain, Hungary, Scotland, Denmark, Singapore, the Netherlands etc. have Display Advertising.
The social media traffic of the national libraries' websites includes 26 different forms of social media (Fig. 2.). Most national libraries have been using social media for several years for outreach, marketing and advertising purposes. Their promotion in social media becomes vital from the point of view of balancing the creation and implementation of library products and services and their acceptance by users. Webometric research of national libraries 'websites proves that social media is indeed an effective communication and marketing channel for promoting libraries' web projects. So 96 websites out of the 136 analysed by Similarweb had Social media traffic. The users of these websites most often visit the sites from different forms of social media. They are well-known universal social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Renren, Douban, Odnoklassniki, Vkontakte; professional social media channels: Linkedin; scientific ones: ResearchGate, Academia; microblogging: Twitter, Plurk, Sina Weibo; video, photo and slide hosting ones: Youtube, Flickr, Pinterest, Slideshare, Dailymotion; cloud services: Scribd, SoundCloud; crowdsourcing hosting Wikia; the social news website Reddit; bookmarking services: Hatena Bookmark, Pocket; online music catalog Last.fm; programming questions and answers: Stack Overflow; and WhatsApp Webapp, Telegram messengers.
It should be noted that users visit the libraries' websites both from social media, where the official accounts of library institutions have already been set up, and from the services where the promotion of the latter haven't taken place yet. Moreover, some national libraries do not have their own website or their official resources have been irrelevant for a long time, and they only have social media channels to represent them on the Internet. For example, the National Library and Archives of Tuvalu, which, in the absence of the website, has an official Facebook account and has 1,435 subscribers (1379 likes).
The popularity of mobile technology has drawn attention of national libraries to design and develop mobile applications to focus on "connecting" users to digital library assets. Libraries that have powerful digital assets and a wide range of information products and services for different user categories develop mobile applications. According to the research results, only 12% of national libraries have mobile applications (Fig. 3). The Bibliothèque Nationale de France (the National Library of France) has 12 applications that is the largest number of applications; four libraries have 5 mobile applications; one - 4 applications, The National Library in Singapore - 3; 6 libraries have developed 2 applications; 10 libraries have 1 application each. Mobile applications are available on the libraries' websites, Google Play or the App Store, they are free and target a wide audience. 5
It should be pointed out that the research results are theoretical and relative taking into account high variability of the web environment and the fact that no mechanism for collecting and analyzing website statistics makes it possible to obtain perfectly accurate metrics. In addition, the technical implementation of national libraries' websites is sometimes fundamentally different. Some of them are advanced portals; others are websites with a minimum number of pages and features.
Website storage, total number and the format of features, content characteristics are all in direct ratio to the number of direct and referral traffic of the website, pages per view, bounce rate and other metrics. However, the research results allow us to find out the main trends of the national libraries' website development. The websites that are correctly set up and optimized according to the latest trends of technologies development have high traffic. Website's visit duration metrics, pages per view, data of the relevance and website promotion in various geographical regions show a wide rage and the core or the pull of regular users.
Data of the direct and referral traffic, website's position in the categories, rankings, search engines and social media traffic indicate the successful integration of libraries' content into the web environment, identification of the most required resources of libraries and future development directions, gradual development of websites' reputation of particular libraries.
Further detailed research on the structure and features of the websites' traffic can be
the basis for the development of approaches and algorithms for optimization, security
communication institutions with high access.
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