Evaluation of Digital Library Impact and User Communities by Analysis of Usage Patterns

At present, digital library (DL) policy is largely informed by management intuition and coarse measures of user satisfaction. Most DLs, however, maintain extensive server logs of user retrieval requests that contain a wealth of information on user preferences and the structure of user retrieval patterns. We propose a quantitative approach to DL evaluation that analyzes the retrieval habits of users to assess the impact of a collection of documents and to determine the structure of a given DL user community. We discuss a system that we have developed to automatically generate extensive journal and document networks from an efficient and simple analysis of user retrieval sequences registered in a particular DL's server logs.