I’m working with someone in our IT department to look at our consortial OPAC usage data. This is really at the edge of my abilities so I’ll be rather blindly documenting that process here – hopefully it will be interesting and helpful to someone but I’m certainly not an expert in this area – at least not yet!
Tentative Process
- Download logs from CARLI.
- Creator Decoder.
- Design database
- Write parser thing
- Do basic analysis in MySQL.
- Do more advanced analysis in Weka.
We are going to use the program Weka to do this bit of data mining and I’ve installed this on my local machine. It was pretty easy to install and download – so that was nice. Here is the link: http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/index.html
Research Questions
These are the basic questions that are currently guiding my database design:
- Basic numbers for the searches – how many?
- How does VuFind compare to Classic Search?
- Types of searching (title, keyword, author)
- Search terms – what are the most popular? What are common misspellings?
- Platform and OS?
- What formats/filters/facets are applied?
- Time of day?
- Mobile vs. Desktop?
- Look at Curriculum Center headings (start with a heading and see if it is used).
- Number of search terms (how many terms in a kw search, for example)
- Spelling Errors
- Failed searches (no results)
- Clicked vs. type subjects (i.e. what happens when someone clicks a subject heading?)