User's Behaviour inside a Digital Library

CASPUR allows many academic Italian institutions located in the Centre-South of Italy to access more than 7 million articles through a digital library platform. The behaviour of its users were analyzed by considering their "traces", which are stored in the web server log file. Using several web mining and data mining techniques the author discovered a gradual and dynamic change in the way articles are accessed. In particular there is evidence of a journal browsing increase in comparison to the searching mode. Such phenomenon were interpreted using the idea that browsing better meets the needs of users when they want to keep abreast about the latest advances in their scientific field, in comparison to a more generic searching inside the digital library.