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Julie Linden (PIC chair and the Government Information Librarian at the Social Science Library) gave a description of the software WebTrends. (http://www2.library.yale.edu:1099 , note that you must use IE to access WebTrends, it does not work with Firefox. Login with anonymous and use your Yale e-mail address as your password) WebTrends lets us track such things as

• the most popular web pages on the library's site (as measured by page visits: page visits exclude such things as images on a web site, which can inflate the page hits number)
• what Google searches bring people to the Web page

WebTrends gives a report for one web server at a time. The library runs different Web servers (e.g., Floyd which has such things as news items and database information pages, and Ogma which has the library's html pages) and separate WebTrends reports must be run for each. Also, the Medical and Law libraries have separate servers.

In response to a question, it was pointed out that we do not use WebTrends to track who specifically uses our library web site.

Rick Zwies (Webmaster at the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library) demonstrated the results of a study run on the links from the Library's Front Door. The results are available at http://www.med.yale.edu/library/test/yul/front-door-survey.html. For three days a record was kept of each time anyone selected (or clicked on) a link from the Front Door (results). Databases and Article Searching (upper left quadrant) is the most used link. QuickLinks get relatively little use, especially given their prominence on the page.

Kalee Sprague (Systems Librarian, ILTS) showed the Orbis logs, which have been run since April 2004. The OPAC Stats are available at http://www.library.yale.edu/~lso/databaseadmin/opac_stats. On average, there are 500,000 searches in the OPAC each month. Z3950 searches comprise almost half of these searches. Some Z3950 searches originate from Yale faculty and students who use z39.50 connections in EndNote and RefWorks to search Orbis. Much of the Z3950 activity originates from other institutions who are either executing federated searches or are crawling Orbis for cataloging records.

OPAC stats also record what search types are used most often (e.g., author, title, etc.) Last fall PIC reordered the search options in Orbis to mimic the order of the most popular searches on the theory that this will make it easiest for searchers to find those options they need most often. The transaction logs also revealed that the Orbis Keyword search was generating a number of zero hits. The Orbis Keyword search required users to type in the Boolean operators "and, or, not", or enclose a phrase search in quotes, in order to get a result; unfortunately, users assumed the keyword search worked like a Google search, and were not entering the operators. To counter this problem, PIC installed a piece of Javascript code developed successively by the Getty, UCLA, and Yale, to automatically insert a Boolean 'and' in keyword searches. This change has reduced the number of searches resulting in zero hits, and has increased the popularity of the Keyword index.

Karen Reardon (Manager, Web, Workstation and Digital Consulting Services) answered our original question: Marilyn Monroe, Moses and David Stern were all "googled" on our library's Google search on one day last month. PIC decided to change from the old HTDIG search service to Google's free academic search last year. At random times we have examined these logs. At one time in the semester Karen noticed that a lot of questions were entered on the Google search about paying fines, and she suggested to Access Services that they post documentation to meet this demonstrated user need. Recently PIC did a brief analysis that showed that a very large percentage of searches entered in the Library's Google search were inappropriate, e.g., searches for journal or book titles. Based on this evidence, a new search was created that forces the user to specify what to search (journals, Orbis, the staff directory, etc.) At some time in the future, the next logical step will be to implement a search that automatically searches all these sources at one time.

Katie Bauer (ELI Interfaces Librarian) described how these tools (WebTrends and transaction) logs can tell us some things about what users do on our Web site, but cannot answer other questions we have. We do not know if a user felt the results of an Orbis search was successful, or if a user was satisfied with their visit to the Web site. This problem can be addressed with other tools, one of which is usability testing. Usability testing lets us study the interaction between human and computer, and helps us to measure subjective characteristics, such as satisfaction. We will be pursuing more usability testing as Metalib is implemented and as the PIC continues to explore the Front Door and other Library Web pages. Programmatic use of all these tools will help us to keep the user at the center of technology initiatives in the Library.

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This file last modified 10/18/06
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