Prologue to Perfectly Parsing Proxy Patterns

Abstract

As libraries spend an increasing percentage of precious collection funds on electronic resources, important questions arise to drive collection management decisions: What is being used? How much? and finally Who is using our resources? Vendor supplied statistics can help answer the first two questions, but we have encountered specific questions about our users at Mercer University.

To help answer this question, we turned to our proxy server logs and began a pilot study in the spring semester 2017. This presentation will explain the methodology we used in mining data from our proxy server logs in combination with our existing user database. It will describe the demographic information we were able to glean from this combination of information resources. We uncovered valuable insights to our database usage including: usage pattern over time, database popularity by program, database usage by enrollment status, usage by faculty/employee group, and usage by campus group.