Since January 2015, academic libraries in Norway are making use of Oria, a catalog based on the ExLibris Primo software. Within Oria, various user actions, such as searches and clicks on search filters are captured over time, and statistical data can be accessed via Primo Analytics. This wealth of data provides new opportunities to analyze user interaction with current library catalogs, and to potentially improve the access to library collections.
In an exploratory study within the Visual Navigation Project, we have analyzed the log data available of the library catalog of the University of Oslo. In particular, we looked at two datasets: the most popular queries (between January 2015 and September 2016), and the “zero-result” queries, i.e. the queries for which searches did not get any results (between August 2015 and September 2016).