The authors introduce a method for visualizing user transaction logs from a library catalog application. Simplenvisualization supporting intuitive or qualitative analysis to quickly make sense of complicated patterns can be a usefulnsupplement or alternative to more common quantitative analysis. To this end, a visual flowchart is created illustratingnan individual user session. This visualization can be used to qualitatively grasp user behavior within the application,npossibly as an aid to identifying patterns or clusters of use. These flowcharts are created by automatically preprocessingnapache transaction logs into an XML representation of meaningful user actions, which are then convertednvia JavaScript in a web browser to HTML table based flowcharts. The particular toolkit introduced is namednVisualization for Understanding Transaction Logs (VUTL), and is available with an open source license. The toolkit hasnbeen prototyped with logs from the catalog applications of several academic and one public library.
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