A crucial problem for these repositories remains timely and appropriate document access. In this article, we borrow a model from psychological research on human memory, which has long studied retrieval of memory items based on frequency and recency rates of past item occurrences. Specifically, the model uses frequency and recency rates of prior document accesses to predict future document requests.
Results show that the model predicts document access rates with a reliable degree of accuracy.
We describe extensions to the basic approach that combine the recency and frequency analyses and which incorporate respository structure and document type. These results have implications for the formulation of descriptive user models of information access in large repositories. In addition, we sketch applications in the areas of design of information systems and interfaces and their document-caching algorithms. World Wide Web repository during a three-month period, namely January through March 1994, are analyzed. One such model is extended to incorporate both the repository structure and the document style.