An analysis of transaction logs to evaluate the educational needs of end users

End users at the University of Southern California (USC) have free access to the last ten years of MEDLINE through a local online system known as USCInfo. Librarians at USC Norris Medical Library provide documentation and offer formal and informal training on the use of the system to search MEDLINE. To assess the educational needs of the end users, 643 searches were analyzed. Although a high proportion (84%) of the searches were judged to be successful, the use of medical subject headings (MeSH) to obtain optimal results was low; only 20% of all successful subject searches employed MeSH. Also, the advanced features of the system were underutilized. While it is promising to learn that many end users are obtaining positive results, methods which will encourage end users improve their retrievals need to be developed.