Monitoring and evaluating use of the World Wide Web in an academic library: An exploratory study

The purpose of this study is to examine the use of the World Wide Web on public access computers at the American University Library, located in Washington D.C. American University Library is a medium sized academic library that offers unrestricted access to the Web on 43 publicly available computers located throughout the library. Data collection was done with a commercial network monitoring software package running on a computer attached to the library's public access computer network. The data that were generated from the monitoring logs are examined here. The goal of the study was to identify the most frequently accessed Web sites, the frequency with which library owned Web resources were accessed, and Web usage patterns in the library in relation to the time of day and day of the week. The results show high usage of some library Web resources and statistically significant patterns of Web use depending on the time of day.