The Central Medical Library (CMK) at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, created its Web site in 1997 and has since then been actively involved in its maintenance and ...improvement. The analysis of Web site usage, which was performed using different data-mining methods, revealed an increasing interest among the Slovene biomedical community. Patrons have often complained to librarians about information overload and difficulty in following all the Web site's enhancements. This situation called for a dynamic restructuring of the CMK Web site. Such problems are often solved with customisable and personalised library portals. Having limited financial and human resources, it was decided to customise and extend an existing library portal software solution (MyLibrary from North Carolina State University). The MyLibrary portal for the CMK was not only customised, but some important new functionality, most notably multilingual support, was added. This experience of developing a personalised library portal could be of interest to most libraries that offer information in at least two languages.
This article describes the development of the Central Medical Library website at the Medical Faculty of Ljubljana, Slovenia. The aim of the website is to serve as a guide to the library resources and ...services. The website is built with a uniform graphic design and a menu driven structure. The structure partitions information space by providing meaningful subject categories that enable efficient exploring by browsing. Because the categories are limited in their granularity a search engine based on the Harvest system is included. An evaluation of website access was carried out by analysing and exploring the web server log files using data warehousing and OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) technology. Finally some possibilities for future development of the website are suggested.
The Central Medical Library (CMK) at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, started to build a library Website that included a guide to library services and resources in 1997. ...The evaluation of Website usage plays an important role in its maintenance and development. Analyzing and exploring regularities in the visitors' behavior can be used to enhance the quality and facilitate delivery of information services, identify visitors' interests, and improve the server's performance. The analysis of the CMK Website users' navigational behavior was carried out by analyzing the Web server log files. These files contained information on all user accesses to the Website and provided a great opportunity to learn more about the behavior of visitors to the Website. The majority of the available tools for Web log file analysis provide a predefined set of reports showing the access count and the transferred bytes grouped along several dimensions. In addition to the reports mentioned above, the authors wanted to be able to perform interactive exploration and ad hoc analysis and discover trends in a user-friendly way. Because of that, we developed our own solution for exploring and analyzing the Web logs based on data warehousing and online analytical processing technologies. The analytical solution we developed proved successful, so it may find further application in the field of Web log file analysis. We will apply the findings of the analysis to restructuring the CMK Website.
Biomedicina Slovenica on the World Wide Web HRISTOVSKI, D; ROZIC-HRISTOVSKI, A
Program : electronic library and information systems,
07/1999, Letnik:
33, Številka:
3
Journal Article
PDF
