Contents:
- Introduction
- Research Questions
- Related Work
- Method
- Transaction Log Analysis
- Discussion and Conclusions
- Acknowledgments
- References
- Appendix
This article, subtitled A Transaction Log Analysis, characterizes the searching behavior of media professionals in the Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid (Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision), a large, national audiovisual broadcast archive. Its results are based on an analysis of six months of transaction logs held by the archive combined with an analysis of material ordered for purchase during the same period. After posing four research questions, it provides an overview of other research undertaken on transaction logs in archives, presents their research methodology and then presents ‘lessons learned’ in five areas analyzed: session, query, term, facet and order. It concludes by answering the initial four questions and providing recommendations to archives on how searching and ordering functionality may be improved. This article appeared in the Journal of the American Society for Information Society, Volume 61, Issue 6, June 2010 and is also published online by Wiley InterScience. It is written by researchers at the University of Amsterdam, The Free University of Amsterdam and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision.
This study provides interesting feedback to broadcast archives looking to understand their users and their search and retrieval needs better. The authors rightly stress the context within which the research was performed since its outcomes reflect a specific type of user and collection (media professionals and broadcast archives). It is a welcome piece of research in an area not very well studied and the results are clearly conveyed in its tables and ‘lessons learned’ approach.