Facilitating resource allocation decision through bibliomining: the case of UTM's library

Library has vastly developed and demand from the users, institutions, international organization needs and technology advancement has changed the library planning and decision making approach in many ways including library budgeting, human resource and infrastructure allocations. This research described (a) the investigation undertaken to examine the characteristics of data from data reservoirs regarding user/patron information and circulation information. (b) The information seeking to explore the patterns and trends among these data reservoirs using data mining analysis with about 957,224 borrowing history and overall 31,052 registered readers and 139,195 title author of books from the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia library since 2008 to 2010. (c) To study how constructed patterns and trends generate informed decisions on resource allocation for circulation function by using cluster analysis, frequency statistics, averages and aggregates and market basket analysis algorithm. This thesis highlights the finding of a research using data mining technique (CRISP-DM) to explore the potentials of the bibliographic data of an academic library. With nearly 1 million records of collection in various formats, the Library of Universiti Teknologi Malaysia has been chosen as the case study for the research. The data mining technique was adopted to explore the relationship among statistically patterned and clustered bibliographic data. Bibliomining are tools that can visualize how libraries manage their costs, staff activity, customer service, user needs, marketing, popular books, circulation, reference transaction, quality of collection, educational programs etc. Similar data mining techniques are suggested to be employed in different library settings and even enterprises as to make more effective use of organizational resources

Optimizing E-Management Using Web Data Mining

Today, one of the biggest challenges that E-management systems face is the explosive growth of operating data and to use this data to enhance services. Web usage mining has emerged as an important technique to provide useful management information from user's Web data. One of the areas where such information is needed is the Web-based academic digital libraries. A digital library (D-library) is an information resource system to store resources in digital format and provide access to users through the network. Academic libraries offer a huge amount of information resources, these information resources overwhelm students and makes it difficult for them to access to relevant information. Proposed solutions to alleviate this issue emphasize the need to build Web recommender systems that make it possible to offer each student with a list of resources that they would be interested in. Collaborative filtering is the most successful technique used to offer recommendations to users. Collaborative filtering provides recommendations according to the user relevance feedback that tells the system their preferences. Most recent work on D-library recommender systems uses explicit feedback. Explicit feedback requires students to rate resources which make the recommendation process not realistic because few students are willing to provide their interests explicitly. Thus, collaborative filtering suffers from “data sparsity” problem. In response to this problem, the study proposed a Web usage mining framework to alleviate the sparsity problem. The framework incorporates clustering mining technique and usage data in the recommendation process. Students perform different actions on D-library, in this study five different actions are identified, including printing, downloading, bookmarking, reading, and viewing the abstract. These actions provide the system with large quantities of implicit feedback data. The proposed framework also utilizes clustering data mining approach to reduce the sparsity problem. Furthermore, generating recommendations based on clusters produce better results because students belonging to the same cluster usually have similar interests. The proposed framework is divided into two main components: off-line and online components. The off-line component is comprised of two stages: data pre-processing and the derivation of student clusters. The online component is comprised of two stages: building student's profile and generating recommendations. The second stage consists of three steps, in the first step the target student profile is classified to the closest cluster profile using the cosine similarity measure. In the second phase, the Pearson correlation coefficient method is used to select the most similar students to the target student from the chosen cluster to serve as a source of prediction. Finally, a top-list of resources is presented. Using the Book-Crossing dataset the effectiveness of the proposed framework was evaluated based on sparsity level, and Mean Absolute Error (MAE) regarding accuracy. The proposed framework reduced the sparsity level between (0.07% and 26.71%) in the sub-matrices, whereas the sparsity level is between 99.79% and 78.81% using the proposed framework, and 99.86% (for the original matrix) before applying the proposed framework. The experimental results indicated that by using the proposed framework the performance is as much as 13.12% better than clustering-only explicit feedback data, and 21.14% better than the standard K Nearest Neighbours method. The overall results show that the proposed framework can alleviate the Sparsity problem resulting in improving the accuracy of the recommendations