Outstanding Questions and
Next Steps
•Zero hits issue
•Query string analysis
•Search errors
•Find it at Cornell – further research
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As expected, our data analysis answered some of our questions and raised important new ones:

For example, we would like to better explore the relationship between Find Databases and Find Articles when it comes to zero hits.  When a user tries a search in Find Databases and gets zero hits, what then?  Does he or she try the same search in Find Articles?  In order to perform this kind of analysis, currently we would need to merge data from the Apache logs and the ENCompass tables.

When a user gets zero hits, what search terms are being used?  We can look at the actual query string from the ENCompass logs and perform an analysis for complexity, i.e., length of string, and misspellings, for both Find Articles and Find Databases.  For Find Databases, we can determine what databases are being misspelled often and add metadata in the object record for those resources in order to improve user access.

We know that users are encountering search errors but have not delved into the error logs themselves, which are not included within the ENCompass logs.

We have just begun to scratch the surface with our analysis of Find it at Cornell or LinkFinder Plus.  We have started to perform analysis on the Apache LFP file but have not analyzed data from the LFP file within ENCompass.  We want to know if it would be possible to use usage data to track whether a user indeed clicks on a full text link from Find it at Cornell when it is available.