From website log to findability

Abstract

PurposeIn the digital library era, library websites are recognized as the extension of library services. The usability and findability of library websites are growing more and more important to patrons. No matter how these websites have been built, they should offer the capability that patrons can find their required information quickly and intuitively. The website logs keep tracks of users' factual behaviors of finding their required information. Based on the evidences, the author attempts to reconstruct the websites to promote their internal findability.Design/methodology/approachIn the past, the card sorting method has generally been applied to reconstruct websites to improve their internal findability. Alternately, in this research, a first attempt is made to try to use website log data to implement website reconstruction. The website log data was cleaned and user sub‐sessions were extracted according to their respective critical time of session navigation. Each sub‐session's threshold time of target page was then calculated with different weights to determine its navigating parent pages. The different weighted parent pages were utilized to reconstruct various websites. A task‐oriented experiment of four tasks and 25 participants was conducted to measure the effects of findability between the constructed websites.FindingsBy analysis of the variance of time to complete the tasks, it is shown that the reconstructed websites have better findability performance in the time spent to complete the tasks than the current one, if focusing much more on the target pages. The result clearly explores that when the parent pages of a page are selected, whether it is a target page is the most important issue to improve website findability. The target page plays a critical role in website reconstruction. Furthermore, the traditional card sorting method is applied to the case website to reconstruct it. The findability experiment is then conducted and its time to complete the tasks is compared to those of websites that are reconstructed. The approach proposed here has better effects than card sorting.Originality/valueMining web log data to discover user behaviors on the library website, this research applies a heuristic method to analyze the data collected to reconstruct websites. Focusing on the target pages, the reconstructed websites will have better findability. Besides traditional card sorting techniques, this paper provides an alternative way to reconstruct websites such that users can find what they need more conveniently and intuitively.

Literature Review of Data Mining Applications in Academic Libraries

“…Shieh (2012) utilizes log analysis and statistical tools to evaluate the usability and findability of library websites. Statistics tools are employed in the total of three articles, which include two of the above-described studies: Blecic et al (1998), Shieh (2012, and the study presented by Tosaka & Weng (2011) using statistical tools to examine the effect of contentenriched records on library materials usage. Logical analysis of data is discussed in two articles.…”

Determinación de grupos de usuarios de bibliotecas digitales mediante el análisis de ficheros log

“…Los objetivos finales de estos artículos inciden en la mejora de los servicios y de la experiencia del usuario (Tobias y Blair, 2015) o la mejora de la usabilidad y el diseño del sitio web (Shieh, 2012).…”

Interactividad, buscabilidad y visibilidad web en periodismo digital galardonado

“…La buscabilidad como elemento de la arquitectura de información en medios digitales La buscabilidad es el conjunto de servicios que un sitio web pone a disposición del usuario para que pueda realizar búsquedas retrospectivas de información publicadas por el propio medio (Linares et al, 2016). En este sentido, los estudios más destacados se centran principalmente en sitios web generalistas y sitios web de bibliotecas y su efecto en la experiencia de usuario (Morville & Sullenger, 2010;Shieh, 2012), aunque también se pueden observar algunos estudios transversales centrados en cibermedios (Linares et al, 2016;Lopezosa et al, 2020). Las investigaciones sobre buscabilidad y webs generalistas se han enfocado en analizar la arquitectura de la información de aspectos como la búsqueda interna (Spagnolo et al, 2010) y la localización de recursos digitales educativos desde la perspectiva de la participación inclusiva de los usuarios con discapacidad (Navarrete & Lujan-Mora, 2015).…”