A comparative transaction log analysis of two computing collections

Abstract

Transaction logs are invaluable sources of fine-grained information about users’ search behavior. This paper compares the searching behavior of users across two WWW-accessible digital libraries: the New Zealand Digital Library’s Computer Science Technical Reports collection (CSTR), and the Karlsruhe Computer Science Bibliographies (CSBIB) collection. Since the two collections are designed to support the same type of users-researchers/students in computer science a comparative log analysis is likely to uncover common searching preferences for that user group. The two collections differ in their content, however; the CSTR indexes a full text collection, while the CSBIB is primarily a bibliographic database. Differences in searching behavior between the two systems may indicate the effect of differing search facilities and content type.