The Use of OPAC in a Large Academic Library: A Transactional Log Analysis Study of Subject Searching

The analysis of user searches in catalogs has been the topic of research for over four decades, involving numerous studies and diverse methodologies. The present study looks at how different types of users effect queries in the catalog of a university library. For this purpose, we analyzed log files...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of academic librarianship 2007-05, Vol.33 (3), p.327-337
Main Authors: Villén-Rueda, Luis, Senso, Jose A., de Moya-Anegón, Félix
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Academic Libraries
Colleges & universities
Exact sciences and technology
Indexing
Information and communication sciences
Information processing and retrieval
Information retrieval. Man machine relationship
Information science. Documentation
Information Seeking
Internet
Library cataloging
Online catalogues
Online Searching
Research Libraries
Research process. Evaluation
Sciences and techniques of general use
Search strategies
Searches
Transaction log analysis
Users (Information)
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Summary:The analysis of user searches in catalogs has been the topic of research for over four decades, involving numerous studies and diverse methodologies. The present study looks at how different types of users effect queries in the catalog of a university library. For this purpose, we analyzed log files to determine which was the most frequent type of search conducted among different user types. Results show that searches by browsing are similar in frequency to the analytical queries, and that only 14 percent of queries actually specify the subject heading.
ISSN:0099-1333
1879-1999
DOI:10.1016/j.acalib.2007.01.018