Metadata categorization for identifying search patterns in a digital library
ISSN: 0022-0418
Article publication date: 10 December 2018
Issue publication date: 19 February 2019
Abstract
Purpose
For digital libraries, it is useful to understand how users search in a collection. Investigating search patterns can help them to improve the user interface, collection management and search algorithms. However, search patterns may vary widely in different parts of a collection. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how to identify these search patterns within a well-curated historical newspaper collection using the existing metadata.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors analyzed search logs combined with metadata records describing the content of the collection, using this metadata to create subsets in the logs corresponding to different parts of the collection.
Findings
The study shows that faceted search is more prevalent than non-faceted search in terms of number of unique queries, time spent, clicks and downloads. Distinct search patterns are observed in different parts of the collection, corresponding to historical periods, geographical regions or subject matter.
Originality/value
First, this study provides deeper insights into search behavior at a fine granularity in a historical newspaper collection, by the inclusion of the metadata in the analysis. Second, it demonstrates how to use metadata categorization as a way to analyze distinct search patterns in a collection.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This research was partially supported by the VRE4EIC project, a project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 676247. The computational part of the research has been carried out on the SWISH DataLab software infrastructure developed within the VRE4EIC project (Bogaard et al., 2017). The authors thank the National Library of the Netherlands for providing access to their data and feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.
Citation
Bogaard, T., Hollink, L., Wielemaker, J., van Ossenbruggen, J. and Hardman, L. (2019), "Metadata categorization for identifying search patterns in a digital library", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 75 No. 2, pp. 270-286. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-06-2018-0087
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited