Finding Roots, Gems, and Inspiration: Understanding Ultimate Use of Digital Materials

The University of Houston Digital Library (UHDL) is the point of virtual access for digitized cultural, historical and research materials for the university’s libraries. UHDL developed a digital cart” system (DCS) that allow users to download high resolution images from its collections. The DCS records important information supplied by the user regarding the ultimate use of the downloaded images. Until now, no formal analysis of the transaction log for the DCS has been completed. This research is significant because little is known about the ultimate use of digital library materials. Current literature suggests that this problem is not uncommon among digital libraries around the world. Our analysis begins to fill a critical gap in the professional conversation on digital libraries by directly contributing to the small body of literature that is asking who uses digital libraries and for what purposes. This presentation will outline how researchers analyzed data from portions of the transaction logs from the DCS from 2010 to 2013. From this analysis, they will highlight some of the interesting and innovative ultimate uses by patrons. The researchers will discuss the study and offer audience members approaches for analyzing data to determine ultimate use and its ramifications inside and outside of the classroom

Library Website Visits and Enrollment Trends

Objective – Measures of trends in Iowa State University library website visits per student/faculty/staff headcount show decreased use. Analysis was conducted to test for a relationship between this decrease and decreasing graduate/undergraduate enrollment ratios and decreasing visits to a popular digital collection. The purpose was to measure the influence of these factors and to produce an adjusted measure of trend which accounts for these factors.Methods – Website transaction log data and enrollment data were modelled with Box and Jenkins time series analysis methods (regression with ARMA errors).Results – A declining graduate to undergraduate enrollment ratio at Iowa State University explained 23% of the innovation variance of library website visits per headcount over the study period, while visits to a popular digital collection also declined, explaining 34% of the innovation variance. Rolling windows analysis showed that the effect of the graduate/undergraduate ratio increased over the study period, while the effect of digital collection visits decreased. In addition, estimates of website usage by graduate students and undergraduates, after accounting for other factors, matched estimates from a survey.Conclusion – A rolling windows metric of mean change adjusted for changes in demographics and other factors allows for a fairer comparison of year-to-year website usage, while also measuring the change in influence of these factors. Adjusting for these influences provides a baseline for studying the effect of interventions, such as website design changes. Box-Jenkins methods of analysis for time series data can provide a more accurate measure than ordinary regression, demonstrated by estimating undergraduate and graduate website usage to corroborate survey data. While overall website usage is decreasing, it is not clear it is decreasing for all groups. Inferences were made about demographic groups with data that is not tied to individuals, thus alleviating privacy concerns

usage and usability assessment: library practices and concerns

This report offers a survey of the methods that are being deployed at leading digital libraries to assess the use and usability of their online collections and services. Focusing on 24 Digital Library Federation member libraries, the study's author, Distinguished DLF Fellow Denise Troll Covey, conducted numerous interviews with library professionals who are engaged in assessment. The report describes the application, strengths, and weaknesses of assessment techniques that include surveys, focus groups, user protocols, and transaction log analysis. Covey's work is also an essential methodological guidebook. For each method that she covers, she is careful to supply a definition, explain why and how libraries use the method, what they do with the results, and what problems they encounter. The report includes an extensive bibliography on more detailed methodological information, and descriptions of assessment instruments that have proved particularly effective

Indigenous Language Usage in a Digital Library: He Hautoa Kia Ora Tonu Ai.

The research described in this thesis examines indigenous language usage in a digital library environment that has been accessed via the Internet. By examining discretionary use of the Māori Niupepa and Hawaiian Nūpepa digital libraries this research investigates how indigenous languages were used in these electronic environments in 2005. The results provide encouragement and optimism to people who are striving to retain, revitalise and develop the use of indigenous languages in information technologies. The Transaction Log Analysis (TLA) methods used in this research serve as an example of how web logs can be used to provide significant information about language usage in a bilingual online information system. Combining the TLA with user feedback has provided insights into how and why clients use indigenous languages in their information retrieval activities. These insights in turn, show good practice that is relevant not only to those working with indigenous languages, indigenous peoples or multilingual environments, but to all information technology designers who strive for universal usability. This thesis begins by describing the importance of using indigenous languages in electronic environments and suggests that digital libraries can provide an environment to support and encourage the use of such languages. TLA is explained in the context of this study and is then used to analyse aspects of te reo Māori usage in the Niupepa digital library environment in 2005. TLA also indicates that te reo Māori was used by international clients and this usage differed to te reo Māori usage by national (Aotearoa) clients. Findings further reveal that the default language setting of the Niupepa digital library had a considerable impact on te reo Māori usage. When the default language was set to te reo Māori not only were there more requests in te reo Māori but there was also a higher usage of te reo Māori in the information retrieval activities. TLA of the Hawaiian Nūpepa digital library indicated that the Hawaiian language was also used in a digital library. These results confirm that indigenous languages were used in digital library environments. Feedback from clients suggests reasons why indigenous languages were used in this environment. These reasons include the indigenous language content of the digital library, the indigenous language default language setting of the digital library and a stated desire by the clients to use the indigenous language. The key findings raise some interface design issues and support the claim that digital libraries can provide an environment to support the use of indigenous languages

Indigenous languages shaping multi-lingual interfaces

This paper reports on an investigation into the indigenous language usage of two bilingual/multilingual digital libraries. Results show that the indigenous language was significantly used by clients and indicate why clients chose to use the indigenous language. Feedback from clients has suggested how the interface should be improved to assist both indigenous and non-indigenous language usage. These results serve as an example of how indigenous languages are shaping multilingual interfaces

A Complete Year of User Retrieval Sessions in a Social Sciences Academic Search Engine

In this paper, we present an open data set extracted from the transaction log of the social sciences academic search engine sowiport. The data set includes a filtered set of 484,449 retrieval sessions which have been carried out by sowiport users in the period from April 2014 to April 2015. We propose a description of interactions performed by the academic search engine users that can be used in different applications such as result ranking improvement, user modeling, query reformulation analysis, search pattern recognition.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, accepted short paper at the 21st International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL 2017

A log analysis study of 10 years of ebook consumption in academic library collections

Even though libraries have been offering eBooks for more than a decade, very little is known about eBook access and consumption in academic library collections. This paper addresses this gap with a log analysis study of eBook access at the library of the University of Waikato. This in-depth analysis covers a period spanning 10 years of eBook use at this university. We draw conclusions about the use of eBooks at this institution and compare the results with other published studies of eBook usage at tertiary institutes

Recovering Residual Forensic Data from Smartphone Interactions with Cloud Storage Providers

There is a growing demand for cloud storage services such as Dropbox, Box, Syncplicity and SugarSync. These public cloud storage services can store gigabytes of corporate and personal data in remote data centres around the world, which can then be synchronized to multiple devices. This creates an environment which is potentially conducive to security incidents, data breaches and other malicious activities. The forensic investigation of public cloud environments presents a number of new challenges for the digital forensics community. However, it is anticipated that end-devices such as smartphones, will retain data from these cloud storage services. This research investigates how forensic tools that are currently available to practitioners can be used to provide a practical solution for the problems related to investigating cloud storage environments. The research contribution is threefold. First, the findings from this research support the idea that end-devices which have been used to access cloud storage services can be used to provide a partial view of the evidence stored in the cloud service. Second, the research provides a comparison of the number of files which can be recovered from different versions of cloud storage applications. In doing so, it also supports the idea that amalgamating the files recovered from more than one device can result in the recovery of a more complete dataset. Third, the chapter contributes to the documentation and evidentiary discussion of the artefacts created from specific cloud storage applications and different versions of these applications on iOS and Android smartphones

Electronic Publishing: Research Issues for Academic Librarians and Users

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