Extracting User Interaction Information from the Transaction Logs of a Faceted Navigation OPAC

This paper discusses the analysis of Apache web server logs from a faceted catalog interface (OPAC) at North Carolina State University. By grouping individual HTTP requests into user sessions and analyzing in that context, requests can be understood as particular user actions, with more specificity as to purpose and effect of an action. Client IP address and time are used as a sufficient proxy for determining user sessions from logs. Some initial exploratory findings of user behavior in the NCSU OPAC are provided, including that users make use of facets less than of text searching, and that some facet groups are used significantly more than others. Links are provided to the scripts used to make this session-based analysis, which could be modified for use with other facetted OPACs which use an Apache front-end.