Digital Library Archeology: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Library Use through Artifact-Based Evaluation

Archeologists have used material artifacts found in a physical space to gain an understanding about the people who occupied that space. Likewise, as users wander through a digital library, they leave behind data-based artifacts of their activity in the virtual space. Digital library archeologists can gather these artifacts and employ inductive techniques, such as bibliomining, to create generalizations. These generalizations are the basis for hypotheses, which are tested to gain understanding about library services and users. In this article, the development of traditional archeological methods is presented and used to create a conceptual framework for the artifact-based evaluation in digital libraries.