Selecting suitable journal in digital libraries with web usage mining

Abstract

One of the existing sources in digital libraries is electronic journals. Librarians use ejournals' usage data for many practical applications (e.g. to begin or end subscriptions). Publishers and vendors, who have these data, usually don't share them with the librarians or represent only that data which support their sales products. One possible method for evaluation is preparing monitoring system and logging the data related to users' interactions with digital library and collecting transactions and using data analyzing techniques. In this research web usage mining method has been used. Since server log files don't contain precise information and details of users' interactions, this research is going to use client side data, special new category of data called Intentional Browsing Data(IBD), for improving quality of discovered knowledge and exploit IBD as a criterion for determining the journals' desirability in students' viewpoint.The obtained knowledge from analyzing discovered patterns can be used to make decision in journal management and it is a new method in this field. Digital library of Islamic Azad University of Najaf Abad (IAUN) is considered as a practical domain of this research. By using obtained patterns of mining and analyzing collected data, a model is presented to identify desirability of journal according to students' viewpoint. © 2011 Praise Worthy Prize S.r.l. - All rights reserved.