Winter 2025

It’s been a busy year for PastPerfect Online, and our team is continuing to work through updating our many online resources to include information about the exciting changes from our latest update. Keep an eye on the User Guide and Knowledge Base for both new and revised content!

To wrap up 2025, this newsletter is all about statistics. Whether you are looking for information about your own site, are curious about general PastPerfect Online statistics, or are simply a fellow number cruncher, we hope you’ll find something interesting!

Did you know PPO has a built-in reporter showing statistics about the searches done on your site?

The report is broken down into 5 sections that list the number of times each type of search was performed, the average number of records per search, the most frequently searched terms, and the top searches that returned no results. Statistics from the past month are shown by default, or you can choose a custom date range.

The "NO RECORDS Returned" sections are especially helpful to identify if there are gaps in your online collections or your help text needs to be updated or expanded. These may be visitors who tried to find records that haven’t been published yet, looked for data in fields you haven’t shared, or searched for terms that exist in your records but with a different format or spelling. For example, they may see zero results when searching for “Main St.” because it is always written as “Main Street” throughout your records. If you are consistent in your data entry, consider letting your visitors know by adding a note to your Help Text.

Now that you’ve checked out what people are searching for on your site, you’re probably interested in other statistics, like how they reached your site in the first place or which records have been viewed the most.

This information is available through third-party solutions, such as Google’s free Analytics tool. If you don't already have this form of tracking enabled for your PastPerfect Online site, you should check with your Marketing department or the person who manages your main website before getting started. They may already be tracking these statistics for your main website.

Once you’ve chosen a provider and set everything up, they will provide a code (script) that needs to be added to your site. If you use Google Analytics, you may see a Measurement ID instead. Email your code or Google Analytics Measurement ID to pposupport@museumsoftware.com and we will put it in place for you.

It's important to note, however, that these tools can only provide information after they have been added to your site. Be sure to send us your code as soon as possible to have access to statistics for all of 2026 this time next year!

In lieu of a staff pick, here are some exciting – and surprising! – numbers we found about PastPerfect Online.

809 - organizations using PPO

6,168,754 - total Object, Photo, Archive, and Library records shared

0 - sites in North Dakota (the only US state not represented!)

58 - sites in New York, the most of any state

18 - sites outside of the US and Canada

4 - sites sharing more than 100,000 catalog records!

1. The San Diego History Center tops our list with a whopping 193,549 records.
2. The Ohio State University Cartoon Library & Museum follows next with an impressive 137,834 records.
3. Representing California again is the Center for Sacramento History's collection of 123,321 records.
4. Rounding out our top 4 is the National Building Museum, who has published 100,914 records to their site.

Between January 1 and November 30, 2025:

4,355 - total data upload files processed

36,351 - average daily page views across all sites

7,613 - Image Request forms sent

1,914 - Feedback forms submitted

No matter the size of your collection, we are incredibly grateful for each and every one of you. Thank you for choosing PastPerfect Online!

Featured Sites

The University of Arizona Museum of Art

The Smithtown Library

The Reach

View more PastPerfect Online sites on our List of Collections page.

If your site is not listed and you would like to be, please let us know by sending an email with your organization name to pposupport@museumsoftware.com.