The Use of Transaction Logs to Model User Searching Behaviours
Abstract
To optimize search and discovery services, it is important to develop evidence-based models of user information seeking behaviours within distributed retrieval environments. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library has been collecting custom transaction log data from their main gateway interface and its underlying Easy Search (ES) federated search system since 2007. The Illinois team performed a detailed analysis over 1.4 million user searches and 1.5 million user target clickthroughs performed in 2010 – 2011. This analysis has revealed rich information on user search characteristics, search assistance usage, and clickthrough actions.