The Use of OPAC in a Large Academic Library: A Transactional Log Analysis Study of Subject Searching

The analysis of user searches in catalogs has been the topic of research for over four decades, involving numerous studies and diverse methodologies. The present study looks at how different types of users effect queries in the catalog of a university library. For this purpose, we analyzed log files to determine which was the most frequent type of search conducted among different user types. Results show that searches by browsing are similar in frequency to the analytical queries, and that only 14 percent of queries actually specify the subject heading.