Gaining access to and analyzing webserver and CGI script log files requires planning, coordination, and accountability. These issues serve as a beginning point for understanding log analysis. Other issues exist, and still more will develop as intranet usage increases and log analysis techniques become more sophisticated. The goal of both projects was to assess to what extent federal web-enabled tools met the needs of their users. The projects demonstrated the need to begin web-enabled tool evaluation projects with the log file analysis in order to identify high use or problematic parts of the site or tool.
Researchers can then develop more effective within-site webpage sampling techniques.
Without sampling techniques, researchers are faced with the choice of evaluating the entire site or a selection of questionably representative pages. Using log file analysis, researchers can develop code categories of high or low use, and troublesome pages, and then take random selections from within these defined categories. The projects also demonstrated the need to plan for different data formats. Researchers should not assume that the site under study uses standard file name formats or even that the site collects the data in the standard four website log files. It is difficult for the researchers to make suggestions about specific research projects which could make use of log file analysis.