Metadata categorization for identifying search patterns in a digital library

Abstract

For digital libraries, it is useful to understand how users search in a collection. Investigating search patterns can help them to improve the user interface, collection management and search algorithms. However, search patterns may vary widely in different parts of a collection. This study demonstrates how to identify these search patterns within a well-curated historical newspaper collection using the existing metadata. Design/methodology/approach: The authors analyzed search logs combined with metadata records describing the content of the collection, using this metadata to create subsets in the logs corresponding to different parts of the collection. Findings: The study shows that faceted search is more prevalent than non-faceted search in terms of number of unique queries, time spent, clicks and downloads. Distinct search patterns are observed in different parts of the collection, corresponding to historical periods, geographical regions or subject matter. Originality/value: First, this study provides deeper insights into search behavior at a fine granularity in a historical newspaper collection, by the inclusion of the metadata in the analysis. Second, it demonstrates how to use metadata categorization as a way to analyze distinct search patterns in a collection.

Understanding User Behavior in Digital Libraries Using the MAGUS Session Visualization Tool

“…Log analysis in digital libraries Search logs collected from digital libraries and archives has been studied frequently [2,3,6,10,12,15,16,19]. In some cases, studies focus on the detection and analysis of (topical) user interests, for example to categorize search topics [10,15], or to identify usage patterns in different parts of the collection [2,3]. These studies focus on a statistical analysis of search logs.…”

“…Documents in a digital library are frequently described using bibliographic metadata. Clicked documents can be annotated with this metadata, providing insights into the parts of the collection the user searched [3]. format is uncomplicated, providing an overview of user queries and clicked results.…”

“…The search platform provides access to historical newspaper documents using a faceted interface, with the facets based on the (bibliographic) metadata describing the documents within the collection (such as the publication date). We cleaned and split the logs into sessions as described in [3].…”

Bilingual lexical extraction based on word alignment for improving corpus search

“…A digital library is a collection of information that is both digitized and organized (Lesk, 2005) and can be searched for different patterns (Bansode and Shinde, 2019; Bogaard et al , 2019). Over the years, there has been a growing body of multilingual digital libraries (Diekema, 2012; Wu and Chen, 2019) that store content in more than one language.…”

Comparing Methods for Finding Search Sessions on a Specified Topic: A Double Case Study

“…For example, the work presented in [34] demonstrated different search patterns of users searching for five major religions. In a previous study, we observed a distinct search pattern for users searching for documents related to World War II (WWII) [5]. For these types of studies, we need to be able to retrieve those user interactions from the search logs that relate to a user interest in a specified topic.…”